My Life So Far (28 page)

There were always friends hanging out with us: Marlon Brando; Brooke Hayward and her new husband, Dennis Hopper; my brother and his wife, Susan; Yvette Mimieux, who was dating a young French director; Mia Farrow, who was dating Frank Sinatra; Julie Newmar; Viva, who would star in many Andy Warhol movies; Sally Kellerman; and Jack Nicholson. Every Sunday Larry Hagman would don a gorilla suit and march down the beach followed by a swarm of friends carrying banners.

It was an atmosphere the French would call
désinvolte,
friends casually hanging out, with good food and interesting conversation, what I had always been attracted to but was too shy to have initiated. Now I was learning to create that same ambiance, running a home and making things comfortable for people. We were always entertaining, and any French person who came to Los Angeles made a stopover at our home. Dad said in an interview around this time, “She’s outgoing, not at all like me. . . . Look at the kind of home she’s created, look at the life they lead out there in Malibu. People coming, people going, all day long, open house all the time, and Jane handling it all so beautifully, making people feel comfortable. . . .”

I was proud of that.

Dad was dating the woman who would be his last wife, a lovely, enthusiastic, pert woman named Shirlee Adams, only slightly older than me. They had taken a house just down the beach from us. Nathalie attended a nearby school, her English had become fluent as had my French, and we were quite a happy family. For Dad, the fact that Vadim was a fisherman created an affinity; besides, he was not immune to Vadim’s charm.

Sam Spiegel, one of Hollywood’s great producers, offered me a role in Lillian Hellman’s
The Chase,
based on a novel by Horton Foote.
The Chase
was to be directed by Arthur Penn and to co-star Marlon Brando, Angie Dickinson, E. G. Marshall, Robert Duvall, and a relative newcomer, Robert Redford, who would play my husband. What a package, right? What I was to learn, however, was that even the best packaging and assembly of talent can’t guarantee success. While the film did fairly well in Europe, it was a flop in the States. My performance certainly didn’t help. It was a little like “Barbarella comes to small-town Texas.” Maybe out of revenge for all those bad-hair years I’d endured, I was now playing second fiddle to a mane of hair that, as a friend recently said, should have had its own billing.

Two things happened that summer of 1965 that were especially important to me. Strangely enough, both involved parties.

I had a lot of time off during the filming of
The Chase
and decided I would throw a Fourth of July party on the beach. I had never given a big Hollywood party before, but as usual I took it on full bore. I asked my brother, who unlike me was into the new music scene, what band I should hire. The Byrds, he said without hesitation. The Byrds included David Crosby and Roger McGuinn, and there was an underground cult of Byrd Heads who followed them from gig to gig. They were just about to hit big with their version of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Peter’s instinct was right on target; they were perfect. We put up an enormous tent with a dance floor right on the beach. I invited Hollywood’s old guard, and Peter, wanting to make sure there’d be good dancing, got the word out to assorted Byrd Heads. Think “Big Sur Meets Jules Stein,” “Dreadlocks Meets Crew Cut.” Dad set up a spit, where he spent the evening roasting and basting an entire pig, glowing in the attention his unusual culinary skills brought him. I saw it as a big improvement for the shy man.

It was called “the Party of the Decade” and was talked about for a long time to come: the first coming together of old Hollywood and the new counterculture. I remember watching a barefoot flower child standing in the buffet line as she pulled out a breast and began nursing her baby—with George Cukor standing right behind her. This was clearly a first for Cukor, who didn’t know whether to stare or pretend it wasn’t happening. Next to him was Danny Kaye, pretending to
be
a baby who wanted to nurse. Darryl Zanuck, always one to appreciate beautiful women, looked apoplectic. Sam Spiegel, Jack Lemmon, Paul Newman, Tuesday Weld, novelist/diplomat Romain Gary and his wife, Jean Seberg, Peggy Lipton, Lauren Bacall, William Wyler, Gene Kelly, Sidney Poitier, Jules and Doris Stein, Ray Stark, Sharon Tate, Warren Beatty, Natalie Wood, Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, Terry Southern, and all those Byrd Heads were floating out on the dance floor as the band played on. When dawn broke and the tents were coming down, Vadim took me in his arms and said, “You pulled it off, Fonda. Good for you.”

Cat Ballou.

(Photofest)

The Chase.

(Photofest)

With Jason Robards in
Any Wednesday
.

(Photofest)

It
was
good for me.

That same summer I was invited to a fund-raiser for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), hosted by Marlon Brando and Arthur Penn at Arthur’s house. It was the first fund-raiser I had ever been to, and there was an astonishing array of heft in attendance. Two young people from SNCC spoke to us about the organization’s efforts to register black voters in Mississippi. The national Voting Rights Act had just passed, but violent resistance from southern segregationists made getting blacks safely to the polls a dangerous undertaking. They painted a vivid picture of secret meetings at night, attack dogs, fire hoses, beatings, and shootings. They spoke of the reasons for SNCC’s commitment to nonviolent protest; the courage of the southern blacks who worked with them. Many had been killed, black and white alike.

It wasn’t just
what
the SNCC organizers said so much as
how they were
that struck me. There was the calm centeredness of people living beyond themselves. I didn’t feel guilt-tripped, but I did feel like an outsider—as Ralph Waldo Emerson must have felt when he went to visit Henry David Thoreau, who was in jail for refusing to pay taxes to a government that supported slavery.

“Henry,” said Emerson, “what are you doing in there?”

“Ralph, what are
you
doing out
there?
” Thoreau replied.

What was I doing out here?

A seed was sown. We were asked for money. No one had ever asked me to support a cause before. I gave what I could, but I also became a volunteer for the local SNCC group—writing letters, asking others for money. I was indefatigable. I didn’t know how to do it very effectively and I was extremely naïve, but I learned an important lesson that evening: Never underestimate what might be lying dormant beneath the surface of a back-combed blonde wearing false eyelashes. All she might need is to be asked.

That summer I went to my second fund-raiser. All I remember is that Vanessa Redgrave was there, and during the question-and-answer period she raised her hand and, unlike all the others, stood up to speak, turning to look at everyone, owning her space. I will never forget my feelings of awe: Here was a woman who controlled her destiny!

Right after
The Chase
I made
Any Wednesday,
the first of the three films I would make with Jason Robards. Vadim was preparing our next picture in Paris, so I was alone most of the time. My brother would come over at night after work, and that’s when I realized that while I had been adjusting to domesticity in France, he had been creating a niche for himself and was about to become the new generation’s rebel star. It was a funny contrast: I’d have just come from work on the very conventional
Any Wednesday,
and he’d been shooting
The Wild Angels,
a low-budget Roger Corman film. I remember listening in shock while he described a scene where his biker gang had ridden right into a church and had an orgy in the pews. I was definitely an outsider looking in through Peter’s eyes, at the new American counterculture. Usually these evenings would end with him pulling out his guitar, and we’d sing Everly Brothers songs in harmony.

Three years later, in 1969, my father, Vadim, and I sat in a private projection room and watched Peter’s film
Easy Rider,
which hadn’t been released yet. My father really didn’t know what to make of it but was awed that his son had co-written and produced it. I loved parts of it, like Jack Nicholson getting turned on to pot around the campfire and the motorcycle odyssey across America. I thought it unbelievably audacious that they carried kilos of cocaine in their bikes and tripped on acid in a cemetery. But I secretly thought it would be too rough and far-out for most audiences. It was Vadim who understood that here was a no-holds-barred cinematic breakthrough that would resonate immediately and become a classic.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

PUTTING DOWN ROOTS

—R
OBIN
M
ORGAN,
Saturday’s Child

I
WAS AN
A
MERICAN CITIZEN
with a U.S. passport but had become a resident of France—except I
had
no residence. Vadim and I were not married, but we had been together almost three years and were still moving with Nathalie from one rented apartment to another, using furniture left behind by former wives. It was a nomadic lifestyle that suited Vadim, but I felt Nathalie needed more stability, and I needed to nest. I decided that Vadim and I needed a place that was truly ours. I found a very small piece of land thirty-seven miles west of Paris near Houdan. Once there, you meandered down a series of one-lane country roads, through villages hidden behind mossy stone walls, past farmyards and gently undulating fields of oats and barley, interspersed with forests of beech and oak, into and through the hamlet of Saint-Ouen-Marchefroy. Just beyond lay a flat, nondescript piece of land with an old stone farmhouse in great disrepair. I don’t know why this was where I landed. Maybe it was the idea of living near a hamlet that appealed to me; maybe it was those stone walls and the proximity of the woods. Having been smitten with stone walls in Greenwich in my youth, I have remained susceptible all my life.