My Life So Far (72 page)

E
verything about our summer on Squam Lake was magical. Even nature wanted to get in on the act. Take the loon, for instance. The loon is a wondrous bird about the size of a small goose, with dramatic black-and-white markings and a haunting cry that resembles the trill of distant laughter. It dives underwater to catch fish and nests in the lake-rich areas of the northern regions. In the winter it migrates to warmer climes. Loons mate for life, the males and females share in the rearing of their children, and for all of us they became emblematic of the film’s couple, Ethel and Norman Thayer. Loons are shy, wary of humans. One rarely gets the opportunity to watch them up close, but one day some crew members were eating lunch down by the lake’s edge and one of them suddenly came running, calling us to come down. A family of loons, mama, papa, and several babies, were just a few feet offshore and seemed to want to stay there. The camera operator grabbed the camera and filmed them, and they hung out there for several days, as though knowing that this film would be wonderful and wanting to be a part of it. They are the first image you see in the film.

F
rom the moment I arrived in New Hampshire, I began taking backflip lessons from the University of Maine’s swimming coach, who summered near Squam Lake. I started with a belt around my waist, hooked up to a rope that assisted me in the flip, with a mattress to cushion the fall. After a week or so I graduated to the coach’s diving board, and Troy would sit poolside and watch his mother’s pathetic attempts to get herself all the way around, which generally ended with me landing on my back. I was terrified, always on the verge of tossing in the towel. After a month of this I moved to the float, the one in the movie, in front of the house, out in Squam Lake. It was the beginning of July, and I had less than a month to get it right. Every day when I wasn’t needed on the set I would be out there, diving backward, over and over again, my body slapping against the water as I failed to make it around.

Then one day about three weeks into this ordeal on the lake, I finally got it right. Nothing to write home about, but I had managed to flip far enough over to have time to straighten my legs and enter the water headfirst. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to do it again, but at least I’d done it
once.
As I crawled, battered and bruised, onto the shore, out of the nearby bushes appeared Ms. Hepburn. She must have been hiding there, watching me practice. She walked over to where I was standing and said in her shaky, nasal, God-is-a-New-Englander voice, “Don’t you feel good?”

“Terrific,” I answered. And it was true.

“You’ve taught me to respect you, Jane. You faced your fear. Everyone should know that feeling of overcoming fear and mastering something. People who aren’t taught that become soggy.”

Thank you, Lord!
I’d been redeemed. God knows the last thing in the world I wanted to be was soggy, certainly not in the eyes of Ms. Hepburn, a living testament to nonsogginess. It was odd. In the film the backflip was to prove myself to my father. In real life I had proved myself to Ms. Hepburn. Dad probably couldn’t have cared less if I’d done the dive myself or used a stunt double.

We finally shot the diving scene in the third week of July. I managed a fairly good dive and was relieved to have it out of the way. Wrong, wrong, wrong, as Ms. Hepburn would say. A few days later we learned that the footage of the scene had somehow been damaged in the lab and I would have to do it all again. As though that weren’t bad enough, when we finally got around to reshooting, it was mid-September and the water was numbingly cold. I will never forget having to walk out on the diving board, all wet and shivering, while the crew sat in the camera boat in their down parkas. I was out of practice and too cold to execute the dive as well as I had the first time. When I came to the surface and said, “I did it! It was lousy, but at least I did it,” those were my own words, spontaneous and totally true.

T
here is a scene where Dad and Ms. Hepburn are playing Parcheesi and I’m sitting on the couch reading a magazine. Dad makes a remark about my not wanting to play because I’m afraid to lose. I respond, “Why do you like playing games? You seem to like beating people. I wonder why.” After we shot the master and the crew had finished lighting for my close-up, I got into place and realized that there were so many lights on me that I couldn’t see Dad’s eyes, which would hinder my playing of this brief, hostile exchange. It was easy to fix; I just asked the cameraman to throw a little light onto his face. That done, it was time for Dad’s close-up, and just before we were set to go, I asked, “Is it okay, Dad? Can you see my eyes?”

“I don’t need to see your eyes,” he answered dismissively, “I’m not that kind of actor.”

Whoa. His words pierced me to my core. It felt like such a put-down. Forget that I had made this project happen for him. Forget my two Academy Awards, that I was the mother of two children, forget all of that. I was suddenly reduced to a quivering, insecure fat girl, in the same way my character is. As Chelsea says to her mother in another scene, “I act like a big person everywhere else. In California I’m in charge of things . . . yet I get back here with him and I’m just a fat little girl again!” I could relate to that.

And yet—and this is what makes life so interesting for actors; hell, maybe it is why some of us
become
actors—while one part of me was in emotional agony because of his comment, the other half of me was saying,
Oh my God—this is so great. This is exactly the way I’m supposed to feel. This is just perfect for the character.

When the scene was over and everyone had prepared to go home for the day, I remained on the couch, unable to move but sure that no one was aware how Dad’s words had hurt me.

To my surprise Ms. Hepburn came over and sat next to me, put her arms around me, and whispered in my ear, “I know just how you feel, Jane. Spence used to do things like that to me all the time. He’d tell me to go home after I’d done my close-up, say that he didn’t need me to be around, he could do his lines just as well to the script girl. Please don’t feel badly. Your dad has no idea that his words hurt you. He didn’t mean to. He’s just like Spence.” I was deeply grateful for her understanding and compassion. It showed me it hadn’t all been my imagination. I had a witness; I wasn’t alone.

Speaking about her experience on the movie, Ms. Hepburn told her friend and biographer A. Scott Berg, “It was strange. . . . There was certainly a whole layer of drama going on in the scenes between her [me] and Hank, and I think she came by to watch every scene he and I had together. There was a feeling of longing about her.” She was right about the longing. I longed for him to love me and see me as an able grown-up. And for me to do so, too!

On Golden Pond is an archetypal story of love and loyalty, but it’s also about the difficulty of resolving generational differences when a parent is withholding and a child is angry because of it. Of all the films I have made, none seems to have resonated so profoundly with so many people as this one. I realize the universality of the dilemma, because people—men and women—to this day go out of their way to tell me how their relationships with their fathers resemble Chelsea and Norman’s. In many cases, they tell me that it was taking their fathers to see the movie that enabled a breakthrough to occur.

Isn’t one of the difficulties knowing who should make the first move? The child is angry because the parent hasn’t been what he or she should have been, and the child waits for the deficient parent to admit he or she was terrible and to ask forgiveness. But it’s harder to change when you are older. You know you’ve made mistakes, but you don’t understand this new generation and you’re stuck in your ways (unless you keep working on yourself to not get stuck). Playing Chelsea in
On Golden Pond
and paying attention to the advice her mother gives her allowed me to see that it has to be the
child
who makes the move toward forgiveness and that if it is done from a loving place, the parent will almost always be there to receive. One important caveat that Ethel gives Chelsea: “Sometimes you have to look very hard at a person and remember he’s doing the best he can.”

Everyone on the set was sensitive to the fact that my father and I had had a complex relationship and that this film in many ways mirrored real life—but with a resolution at the end. I hoped that somehow the resolution between father and daughter in the film would lap over to Dad and me. He always said that acting gave him a mask that allowed him to reveal emotions he did not feel safe revealing in real life. Maybe showing his emotion about his daughter in the film would release the real ones.

There is a scene with the mother when Chelsea comes back from Europe to pick up Billy. She is hurt that her father has developed such a close relationship with the boy, and her mother is trying to get her to realize that underneath the gruff exterior her father loves her, that she just needs to talk to him and pay close attention.

“I’m afraid of him,” says Chelsea.

“Well, he’s afraid of you. The two of you should get along just fine.”

“I don’t even know him,” Chelsea says plaintively.

“Chelsea,” the mother admonishes, “Norman is eighty years old. He has heart palpitations and trouble remembering things. Just exactly
when
do you expect this friendship to begin?”

The scene that follows is my key scene in the movie, the one where I confront my father. I wade into the water by the dock as Norman and Billy pull up from their fishing trip. “Norman, I want to talk to you.”

“Oh yeah, what about?” he says dismissively.

“I think maybe you and I should have the kind of relationship we’re supposed to have.”

“What kind of relationship is that?” Norman snaps.

“You know, like a father and daughter. . . .”

“Worried about the will, are you? Well, I’m leaving everything to you except what I’m taking with me.”

Chelsea begins to choke up. She fears her attempt at contact will end just like all the others. “I don’t want anything. . . . It’s just . . . it seems you and I have been mad at each other for so long.”

“I didn’t think we were mad. I just didn’t think we liked each other.”

Chelsea is stunned by this cruelty but persists. “I want to be your friend.” And she places her hand on his arm.

From the first, every time I read the script I would come to that scene and tears would pour down my cheeks. In rehearsals I was so emotional that it was hard to speak the lines. Finally the day of reckoning came. I woke up and ran to the bathroom to vomit, more scared than I had ever been before a scene and knowing it was because I had to say intimate words to my father that I had never been able to say in real life. We blocked the scene for the camera and lighting crew, he in the boat, me waist-deep in the water. Even then I was nearly overcome with emotion.

We began with the wide shot that included the two of us, the boat, and the pier. Though I knew a scene like this was ultimately going to play in close-up, I was unable to hold back my emotions. Next we shot over my shoulder onto Dad, and still I gave it my all, partly because I couldn’t help myself and partly because I wanted him to be emotional, too. As I have written in an earlier chapter, I waited until his last shot to touch his arm as I tell him I want to be his friend—I wanted to take him by surprise. It worked. Tears welled in his eyes and he ducked his head, not wanting it to show. But it did. I was so happy.

Then the camera swung around for my close-up. We did a rehearsal for the camera and
. . . oh, no,
the actor’s ultimate nightmare: I was bone dry, spent, unable to call up any emotions. No one knew it, of course, because this was just a rehearsal, but I panicked. What to do? It wasn’t that I had to be overtly emotional in the scene, but I needed to
feel
emotional and then stifle it. I tried to relax, as Strasberg would have wanted. I tried all the sense-memories I had, sang my old song that always made me cry, everything. But nothing seemed to work. As I was pacing around onshore waiting for the camera to be ready (dreading that the camera would be ready), up came Ms. Hepburn. She wasn’t even supposed to be on set that day, but there she was. She looked at me.

“How are you?” she asked, sensing something.

“I’m in trouble. I’ve gone dry. Please don’t tell Dad,” I answered weakly, and then I was called to the set. The time of reckoning had come.

Hoping that some last-minute miracle would unleash my heart, I said to Mark, “I’m going to turn my back to the camera while I prepare, and when I turn around, it means that I’m ready for you to roll.” He understood.

I turned away to prepare, though I had no idea what to do, and as I was staring at the shore, trying to relax and bring myself into the scene, there was Hepburn, crouching in the bushes just within my line of vision. Nobody could see her but me. She fixed me intensely with her eyes, and slowly she raised her clenched fists and shook them as if to say “Do it! Go ahead. You can do this!” She was willing me into the scene: Katharine Hepburn to Jane Fonda; mother to daughter; older actress, who’d been there and knew about drying up, to younger actress. It was all those layers of things and more.
Do it! Do it! You can! I know it.
With her energy she literally
gave
me the scene, gave it to me with her fists, her eyes, and her generosity, and I will never, ever forget it.