(2 of 10)
"I am not neurotic," says Henry, "but I think you become an actor maybe because there are these complexes about you that aren't average or normal, and these aren't the easiest things to live with. You can be easily upset, or short-tempered, or lack patience." It is an uncanny summary of two other Fondas. If, on occasion, Henry is painted warts and all, his children used to picture him warts and nothing. "I'm between planes somewhere," he once recalled, "and a reporter has a clipping that says Jane Fonda thinks her parents led a phony life. Or that she thinks her father should have been psychoanalyzed 35 years ago. Now it's all right for her to think it, but I don't think it's all right for her to say so in interviews. After all, I'm her father.'" Peter was content to show enormous sensitivity—for himself. "I dig my father," he used to say. "I wish he could open his eyes and dig me."
Henry has opened. He digs. "I'm in awe of Peter," he now says. "I can't get over the fact that he got where he is at this point in his life." Peter is 29. Pater is 64. Take away 35 years and Henry is hoofing in New Faces on Broadway for $35 a week. The Fonda name is no help—though in five years it will become so well-known that the Federal Writers' Project guide to Nebraska lists Grand Island as the birthplace of Henry Fonda, stage and screen actor, as well as the home of Jake Eaton, "champion gum chewer of the world, said to be capable of chewing 300 sticks at a time."
Henry has kicked over his job with the Retail Credit Co. and left the Community Playhouse in Omaha.
Willa Cather, laureate of Nebraska, once wrote: "There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before." Fonda is the son of a printer—a conservative, a straight. "I want to live my own life," complains young Henry.
"Sure," says Dad. "But not in my house."
Henry goes through several stock companies and a brief marriage—to Actress Margaret Sullavan. He weds a New York socialite, Frances Seymour Brokaw, by whom he has two children, Jane and Peter. Henry and his ex-roommate, Jimmy Stewart, begin to click onstage. He signs with a hot actor's agent, Leland Hayward —and the ink on the contract rewrites his life.
Weighed and Sifted
"I was visiting Omaha," Fonda recalls, "when I got a two-page telegram from Hayward in Hollywood, telling me to come on out. I sent a one-word telegram saying NO. But nobody can keep saying NO to Leland for very long.
I went out to Hollywood—he met me at the airport, took me to a hotel suite. Half an hour later, as I stepped out of a cold shower, there was Hayward with a man whose name I had heard often.
Dripping wet, I shook hands with Walter Wanger, and that's how I signed for two pictures a year, $1,000 a week." The Fonda style rapidly sets: the methodic drawl, the slightly stooped, wary posture. In a sense, he has never left the credit company. At home, he is a nitpicking perfectionist. At work, each word, each gesture seems weighed and sifted twice before he allows it freedom. His pictures sometimes falter;