PETER, the youngest Fonda, denies it. Henry and Jane, older and wiser, know that talent, like blood type, is decided before birth; that the plainsman, the rebel and the runaway are all branches on the same family tree. It is more than the physical resemblance that unites them—the El Greco shanks, the narrow faces with too much jaw, and the pale, inquiring eyes of hunted animals. There is also a common quality of purpose, a mutual undertow of melancholy.
It is probably no accident that each player has reached his—and her—peak in a doomed role. As Mr. Roberts, Henry Fonda caught the audience's sympathy—and then died discreetly, as one would expect, offstage. Jane's brains are blown away in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? As for Peter, he has the most muscular, corpuscular death: groovily shotgunned down on his bike in Easy Rider. '—Until lately, the Flying Fondas have not been a show-business family notable for harmony. But there is no melody like success. Henry has just completed his 72nd film, The Cheyenne Social Club, and currently is directing the Plumstead Playhouse version of Our Town. Jane has just won the New York Film Critics Award for her gritty, indomitable performance as a Dust Bowl Cassandra in They Shoot Horses. As for Peter, he will doubtless be a millionaire before the age of 30 for producing and starring in Easy Rider, the little movie that killed the big picture. Recognition, and years, have altered them all—particularly the kids. Jane is no longer content to play an ectomorphic Bardot. As a new mother, she resembles a full page in McCall's rather than a Playboy foldout. And the expatriate stance has vanished. "America is where I belong," she says, after a six-year sojourn in France. "This is where it has to happen." The girl who turned down the leading role in Bonnie and Clyde and Rosemary's Baby is not about to let a plum go by her again. "I'll take on anything," she states, "even a musical." Peter, whose volatility could make Librium jittery, has turned out to have, his father says, "one of the great marriages of all time." When he talks today, he sounds as outrageous as ever, but miraculously, studio heads no longer shake their heads in bewilderment; they nod them in bewilderment. As John Cheever puts it at the end of Bullet Park, it is all "as wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful as it had been."
The question is, just how wonderful had it been?