Hollywood: Springtime for Henry

When Henry Fonda’s children were children, they lived on Tigertail Road in Brentwood, Calif., on something that young Jane Fonda now describes as a farm. This is like claiming to have been brought up on a ranch on Park Avenue. But as Jane remembers it. Pa Fonda used to stomp around the property in sideburns or a beard, achinnin’ with the other farmers—John Ford, Jimmy Stewart. John Wayne and so on. All the while, the kids was ferever play-actin’, pretendin’ they was Buck the Buffalo Herder, or Sheena. Queen of the Jungle. “Sometimes we did improvisations with our governesses.” recalls young Peter Fonda. “We lived pretty much the same life my father lived on the screen,” says Jane. ”It was all a big act.” The act is bigger than ever. Jane, at 24, is emerging as a movie star in her own right. She plays a vagrant turned prostitute in Walk on the Wild Side. She has completed The Chapman Report and will begin Period of Adjustment next month; she has already won critical praise for her performances in two Broadway plays.

Peter, 22 next week, scored even higher on Broadway when he opened this season in Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole. The play was forgettable, but Peter—as a bright, engaging, neurotic soldier—was not. Warner Bros, is testing him for the part of John F. Kennedy in PT 109, and Producer Ross Hunter has signed him to a seven year contract. Their father is 56 and still busier than either of his offspring. Three more Henry Fonda films will soon be released (Advise and Consent, The Longest Day, How the West Was Won), and next week he opens on Broadway as the dying hero in A Gift of Time.

Sibling Rivalry. Peter and Jane Fonda are both bright and unashamedly intense. Both can be disarmingly frank. “I’m not talking to him,” Jane once said. “I don’t know where he is, and I don’t care.” “Sibling rivalry,” says Peter, looking over his reviews. “Jane is sure mad at me.” Both are good-looking and look remarkably like Henry Fonda. “It’s much harder on Peter because he’s a man,” says Jane. “He looks like my father, and his voice is like my father’s. When he gets insecure, he acts like him.”

Their mother, who was Henry Fonda’s second wife (he has had four), took her own life during a mental illness in 1950. The children were processed through a series of New York and New England schools. Jane went to Emma Willard School in Troy, N.Y. (“It was ghastly—all girls, and that’s unhealthy”), then on to Vassar. A sophisticated delinquent, she was one Vassar girl who never bought a bicycle, preferring to steal them instead. Unprepared for an exam, she filled her blue book with drawings and handed it in. The college refused to flunk her. gave her a makeup exam instead. After two years she went off to Paris, where she studied French and learned beaux’ arts.

Old Family Friend Joshua Logan cast her in her first movie. Tall Story, and also in her first Broadway play, There Was a Little Girl. The first reviews made her an actress forever. “The Boston critics said I was fragile,” she remembers. “I’m strong as an ox. They said I was coltish, febrile, virginal, translucent—me! I realized I had created something that moved an audience.”

The Wampus. “I’m not so worried about Jane.” says proud Henry Fonda, “but what about Peter? The day will probably come when he’ll be stealing roles away from me.” Peter’s stage experience began in early boarding school days when he wrote, produced and performed in a play called Stalag 17½. In prep school (Connecticut’s Westminster), he organized a sort of Young Vic called the Wampus Players. “A wampus,” by his definition, “is a mythical cat. very large like a dragon, and he doesn’t do anything but eat fair maidens.” But despite all this extracurricular promise, he was miserable at Westminster. “When you are the son of a famous father,” he points out, “there is a great deal of resentment. I think I was resented by everyone.”

Before finishing his junior year, he quit Westminster, took special exams and got himself admitted to the Municipal University of Omaha. Things were rough there, too. in his father’s home town: “There was a certain crowd always jeering at me.” But he did form a permanent, hoops-of-steel friendship with a student named Stormy McDonald, son of the late president of the Zenith Radio Corp. “He became my brother,” says Peter. “He gave me my philosophy: above all else, be true to yourself. Everybody who’s been in contact with me knows Stormy.” In 1960 he left without graduating and did summer stock in upstate New York.

Beers & Drags. Last fall, the favorable reviews for his performance in Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole gave him confidence. Three days later he got married. “Now I can stand on my own two feet,” he says, “and disperse anybody who comes up to me and says, ‘You are here because of who you are and not because of your talent.’ ” He also disperses a shower of eccentricities. He makes his own breakfast, tossing two bananas, three eggs, half a pint of milk and some Bosco into a Waring Blendor. He flies kites. He wears cowboy boots with his tuxedo. He drives a silver 390-h.p. Facel-Vega sports car. “I’ve had beers in every kind of bar in this country.” he drawls, “and I’ve raced with every kind of hood on the road.”

Lee Strasberg once asked him who his favorite actor was. “I hesitated,” Peter remembers, “and said. ‘A cross between Laurence Olivier and Lee J. Cobb.’ If he asked me that today. I’d say my father. I think my father is the best actor I’ve ever seen.”