My Life So Far (6 page)

I
was alone in a hotel room one evening when I opened the thick envelope. When I saw the title, “Medical Records of Frances Ford Seymour Fonda,” I couldn’t breathe. I flung off my clothes and crawled into bed. As I began reading, my body started shaking, my teeth chattering.

In the midst of the nurses’ daily accounts of Mother’s deteriorating condition and the medications they were giving her, I found eight single-spaced pages that Mother had typed herself on admission to the institution, with numerous additions and corrections in her hand.

It was beyond belief. I had longed to know her early story. Now I was holding it in my hands. I’m going to share here those parts of it that have helped me understand her—and hence myself. Added to what she wrote herself are things that I have learned from others, including my half sister, Pan Brokaw.

M
other’s father, Ford Seymour, was a thirty-five-year-old lawyer with a large New York firm when, while visiting his hometown, he saw a photograph in the window of a local photography store of nineteen-year-old Sophie Bower. She lived in Morrisburg, on the Canadian side of the St. Lawrence River. He was immediately smitten, which is not surprising given the fetching twinkle in my grandmother’s eyes and her slightly open mouth with upturned lips. My grandfather was an exceedingly charming, devilish gentleman from a wealthy, well-connected family. He had, as my half sister, Pan, says, “a touch of madness, which was appreciated by the ladies.” Madness indeed! Based on what Mother told them, the Austen Riggs doctors identified him as a paranoid schizophrenic.

He was determined to marry the young Sophie, and she was too young to have seen the warning signs. After the wedding he moved her to New York City. He would come home after work at the law firm complaining of terrible headaches and have Grandma put cold cloths on his head to soothe him. When her mother came to visit them, she saw right away what was up and said to her daughter, “Darling, the reason his head aches is because he’s drunk!” Yes, it turns out Grandpa was a ladies’ man, a poetry-writing philanderer with mental health problems,
and
an alcoholic. Alcoholism, according to a cousin, ran in his family. His paranoia led him to become pathologically jealous of any attention that his male colleagues paid to his beautiful young wife, and in 1906, shortly after the birth of their first child (my uncle Ford), Grandpa left his New York job and bought a farm just outside of Morrisburg on the St. Lawrence River. Within a year, Grandma found herself right back in Canada whence she’d come, and that is where my mother was born, in April 1908. When Mother was a year old, her mother gave birth to a third child, Jane, but there was something wrong with the little girl from the very beginning. She was later diagnosed as epileptic and needed constant attention.

Mother in the 1930s.

The photo of nineteen-year-old Grandma that brought thirty-five-year-old Grandpa a-courting.

Mother in the South of France, 1935.

Life was not easy for the Seymours. Mother described how her father “spanked” the children so often and so hard that Grandma would beg him to stop. Today we call that child abuse. He also kept bars on the doors to keep out anyone who knew Grandma, put towels over the windows, and wired himself into his room. The only outsider allowed to come in was the man who tuned their piano. Mother wrote that when she was eight years old this piano tuner sexually molested her.

I believe this trauma colored her life, and mine—which I will get to in a moment.

Grandpa no longer worked, and the Seymour family received financial help from wealthy relatives, supplementing this by raising chickens and selling eggs and apples. There were no machines to do the washing and no electric irons (although Grandpa expected everything to be ironed all the time); everything had to be made from scratch—including bread, soap, and butter. The only way Grandma could do all the housework and look after her ill daughter Jane was to train the young child to hang on to her skirts at all times. Wherever Grandma went, Jane would be tagging along. How, then, did the other children get the attention they needed? My heart breaks when I imagine my mother, scared of her father’s spankings, hiding the dark secret of her sexual abuse by the piano tuner, and seeing this little Jane take whatever attention her mother had left to give. Mother wrote of her anger at her father for having so many children that he could neither support nor educate.

Grandfather’s sister, Jane Seymour Benjamin, had a daughter, Mary, who was married to Colonel H. H. Rogers, a professional military man and the son and heir of Henry Huttleston Rogers, vice president of Standard Oil. Over the years, Mary Benjamin Rogers, who was a kind, generous matriarch, must have grown aware that her troubled uncle’s family was having a hard time of it up on their farm in Canada. Fifteen years had passed, and by now Grandma had five children to take care of. Mary decided to bring her cousins to Fairhaven, Massachusetts. Before leaving, Grandma put her fifteen-year-old daughter, Jane, into an institution, where she later died of pneumonia.

Mother spent the two final years of high school in Fairhaven and was doted on by her cousin Mary and Mary’s daughter Millicent Rogers, six years my mother’s senior. Millicent was to become a strikingly beautiful and fashionable socialite, jewelry designer, and humanitarian. The Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos, New Mexico, which houses part of her art collection and the heavy gold and silver jewelry she designed, is testimony to her talent and taste. These relatives of Mother’s were interesting, gracious, strong women—the glue that held things together—and they must have been powerful role models. But Mother makes clear in the history she wrote that she was shy and intimidated by them. In her medical records, her doctor wrote, “Always she felt painfully inadequate and inferior socially and intellectually as the poor cousin.”

At their home, Mother met Miss Harris, a secretary on Wall Street who earned $10,000 a year, a startlingly high salary at the time. Maybe this is what gave Mother the idea of becoming a secretary. Mother once told her friend Eulalia Chapin that she “would go to secretarial school, become the fastest typist and best secretary anyone could hire. Then I’d descend on Wall Street and marry a millionaire,” she said. And that is exactly what she did.

With some financial assistance from Mary Rogers, Mother attended Katharine Gibbs secretarial school, pulled a few strings with her family’s banking connections, and landed a job at the Guaranty Trust Company bank, where she learned the business world firsthand. Then, at twenty, she met multimillionaire George Brokaw, whose family fortune had come from factories that made uniforms for Yankee soldiers during the Civil War. Brokaw had recently been divorced from Clare Booth, author and future wife of Time, Inc.’s Henry Luce. In January 1931, Mother and Mr. Brokaw were married and moved into an elaborate stone mansion with a moat around it on the corner of Seventy-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City.

Mother, like her mother before her, married a man nearly thirty years her senior who was a serious alcoholic. Brokaw died in a sanitarium a few years later, leaving my mother with a three-year-old daughter (my half-sister, Frances—nicknamed Pan—Brokaw) and a share of his wealth. No longer dependent on the kindness of cousins, she now assumed the role of dispenser of largesse and immediately moved her mother, sister Marjory, and brother Rogers from Fairhaven to New York City to live with her and help look after Pan. This was when my mother met and befriended the beautiful young Arden model Laura Clark.

I
closed Mother’s medical records and lay in bed feeling indescribably sad for her and at the same time utterly relieved. I wished I could fold her in my arms, rock her, and tell her everything was all right, that I loved her and forgave her because now I understood. Finally, I understood the nature of one of the shadows I inherited from her that has incubated in my body for so long—the shadow of guilt that an abused girl like Mother carries. Why, you may ask, would a child feel guilty for abuse over which she had no control?

For the last decade—not knowing why until now—I have been drawn to studying the effects of sexual abuse on children. What I have learned is that a child, developmentally unable to blame the adult perpetrator, internalizes the trauma as her own fault. Carrying this guilt can make her blame herself for anything that goes wrong and hate her body and feel the need to make it perfect in order to compensate—a feeling that she can pass on to her daughter. (In her history, I was astonished to read of my mother’s shame at having had plastic surgery on her nose and breasts.)

A sexually abused child will feel that her sexuality is the only thing about her that has value, and this frequently results in adolescent promiscuity. Several times in the history she wrote, Mother used the words
boys, boys, boys
to describe her school days. Often, victims of sexual abuse seem to carry a strange luminosity because of the sexual energy that was forced into their lives far too early. I have recognized this in women I know who have been abused and subjected to incest and have seen how men are drawn to it . . . proverbial moths to a flame. Learning this has given new poignancy to my father’s early description of my mother: “She was as . . . bright as the beam from a follow-spot.”

I can now understand that my mother was all the things that people have described—the icon, the flame, the follow-spot—and also all that I had felt as a child—a victim, a beautiful but damaged butterfly, unable to give me what I needed—to be loved, seen—because she could not give it to herself. As a bright, resilient child, I had sensed, with the animal instinct children have, deep wounds that had been inflicted on her early in her life. I had caught the doomed scent of her fragility, which was probably only intensified by the men she chose. As a child, this scared me, and I moved away from it. Now, as an adult, I can see it as
her
story, not mine, and begin to move into my own—which is the story this book aims to tell.

FATHER

M
y father’s people, the Fondas, were originally from a valley in the Apennines, about twelve miles outside of Genoa, Italy. The valley was deep, and the town cradled in it was named Fonda, which means “bottom.” In the fourteenth century, one of my Italian ancestors, the Marquis de Fonda of the Republic of Genoa, attempted to overturn the aristocratic government in order to allow ordinary citizens to elect the doge and the senate. My kind of guy. His efforts failed. He was branded a traitor to his class and fled the country, taking refuge in Amsterdam, Holland. I assume it was during this time that Dutch Calvinism seeped into the Fonda genes. Over the generations, the Fondas became more Dutch than Italian, though there remained, as my brother says, “just enough Italian to put some music into the mix.”