SECTION ONE
PAGE NINE

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

AMERICA'S ANSWER TO BARDOT
THE YOUNG JANE FONDA

IX.

Jane, of course, went to the finest schools.  There was the Greenwich Academy and the Emma Willard School and Vassar.

“I was always getting into trouble at school," she told me.  "I was always prone to gossip.  I was always open to have things told about me that weren’t true.  I did enough things, but they were always making things up, too.  I remember one story that was going around Vassar that I was at a bar and I got up on the table and did a striptease, which was not true at all.  And when these things would get back to me, I would feel ashamed, probably because somewhere in me I would like to have done them---I don't know. And it's one of the reasons why I never stayed at college.

“See, I had been shy for so long and when I was younger I thought I was ugly. And when I finally did start going out with boys--­-I was about thirteen and not terribly popular---it was no fun, I was so shy and I couldn't make conversation.  Soooo, when I discovered that boys liked me I went wild.  I went out all the time.  I never studied."

She would stay up through the night and sleep through her morning classes, either in bed or at her desk.  Her classmates remember her room as a wasteland of feminine clutter.

“She was just sort of sloppy,” said Brooke Hayward, the sister of Bridget Hayward and also a lifelong friend of Jane. “Oh, God, she never got up.  She’d sleep until noon.  I think she never went to one philosophy class the whole freshman year.  And she was very proud of that. I mean she wore it like a feather in her cap, because people on campus would say, ‘My God, where is Jane?' She never showed up.  And I’d go into her room at one or two in the afternoon, she’d be asleep.”

It was at Vassar that Jane first became aware of the power of her father’s name. She remembers people whispering as she walked across the campus, “There's Jane Fonda---she’s Henry Fonda’s daughter," and teachers began patronizing her as if she were the alumni-faculty club.

"Like, I never had to study hard to got good grades," she told me. "But sometimes I would really goof off. For example, once there was a very difficult course and I hadn't studied for it.  I mean I just listened to what I liked to listen to and the rest, I didn't bother.  And I went into the examination and I died.  It's not the kind of a thing you can cram on, and I just didn't know.  So I wrote all over my blue book. I drew pictures of hysterical women---­I have certain faces that I draw, kind of with bags under their eyes, crying and everything.  I distracted a lot of people around me, and I turned it in.

“Well, about three hours later, I got a call in my dormitory from the head of the music department saying, 'We understand, we understand what happened.  Come back tomorrow


Jane
cruised along
on her father's name


at ten o'clock and we'll give you the test over again.' Now I had the exam and I knew what the questions were, so I just learned the questions and I got an A on it.

“So, in a way it's cheating, but all my life I have always been able to come through. I don't know whether that's going on the name Fonda or what, but I mean I would do something like that and people would automatically attribute it to some momentary hysteria or emotional problem that I didn't really have at all. I just didn't know the answers.

"So, at Vassar, I began to use it.  For example, you could take only a certain amount of weekends, and after that the weekends were illegal.

So once I took an illegal weekend---well, I just wanted to see some boy. And so, like, I hid under a stone wall for a few hours and then got picked up by a car that was meant to meet me there. And then I was driven to such-and-such a place and it was all very illegal. And it was about two weeks after my father had remarried Afdera, his fourth wife. Anyway, just before I came back I called my roommate from New York and she said, Jesus Christ, they’re all out looking for you.’

“And I cried' and I was so upset, because you can got kicked out for that. So I called up the house fellow, the professor that was like a Don in the dormitory, and I was crying.  Before I got a chance to say, ‘I'm so sorry, I've gone on an illegal weekend,’ he said, 'That's all right, that’s all right, come back right away and just come in and see me.’

“So, I remember I came back and went straight to his place and he handed me a drink---you know, liquor.  And, like you’re not allowed to drink on campus. And before I was allowed to say anything, he said that he understood the fact that my father had remarried and that I was emotionally upset. And I wasn't.  I'd just gone away with a boy for the weekend.” =

Brooke Hayward, who was born six months before Jane, who lived around the corner from her in Brentwood and who attended the Greenwich Academy with her and then Vassar, remembers Jane with an image that Jane doesn't entirely have of herself.

"She was always generally honest, straightforward, unpretentious," said Brooke, now the wife of actor Dennis Hopper.  "In a funny way, she wasn't like other girls.  She didn't have the guile and the wiles.

"I wouldn’t ever have picked an acting career for Jane when I knew her when she was about sixteen. Even my mother said 'There's just no spark there.’ There was anything else you can name, but there was just no spark. I saw her as being really married rather young and having a sort of social existence, and there was a point where she did a lot of that. There was no real flair for dramatics.  Jane was completely without any sort of that melodrama which comes to young girls in adolescence.  Jane was totally without it.

"She was a tomboy, sort of gay and fun, but there was nothing particularly creative about her.  You know, she liked horses.  Really, she liked to go riding, and that was about the only thing she liked.  And when I told my mother she was going to Lee Strasberg's acting classes, Mother said, 'I can't believe it."'

Brooke Hayward's mother was Margaret Sullavan, Henry Fonda's first wife.  Her father is Leland Hayward, the Broadway producer.

"There was a competitive thing between Jane and Brooke Hayward," said Tony Perkins, one of Jane's former escorts.  "Jane just didn't want to be outdone by Brooke Hayward.  Women can be that way---close friends and very competitive.  The two of them had a very female race to run. It’s my guess the world owes the presence of Jane Fonda among us to Brooke Hayward."

Jane herself told me:

"Brooke always was the one who wanted to be the actress. I didn't want to be an actress.  She was always the one everybody said was going to be a big star. She’s the one, you know, and I was much too shy.”

Jane remembers once riding in a car with David 0. Selznick and listening to him tell Brooke that she had star quality, that she was beautiful, that she was glamorous and that she would become a great actress. Jane remembers that Selznick didn't say anything to Jane. Later Brooke and Jane found themselves both in Lee Strasberg’s acting classes.

"I feel," Brooke told me, "'that for some reason, Jane's always been extremely competitive.  And I don't know why.  I've never figured it out.”  ##

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