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So were the settings. In the Hollywood days, he had built a Pennsylvania-style farmhouse and farm on nine acres in Brentwood. If the world found him at home as an actor, the kids found him more so on a tractor. Jane, in fact, had no idea of her father's vocation until she asked her mother why Daddy occasionally wore a beard. She adored him. She recalls, "I spent half of my young life wanting to be a boy because I wanted to be like my father." Still, it is easier to be Henry Fonda's daughter than his son. "Peter was always rebellious," recalls Henry.
"We overworried about him, I think."
Peter overrebelled. Resentment exuded from his pores. Years later he recalled an early boarding school: "What kind of parents would send a kid away at six to make his own bed?" A childhood friend remembers him as "a weird kid, relegated to purgatory." Peter admits, "I was shy, difficult and I lied a lot." Peter may have been a hellion, but Jane was a well-behaved, red-haired stick figure at the Brentwood Town and Country School. Her class was filled with other kids as plain as Jane: Gary Cooper's and Claude Rains' daughters, Laurence Olivier's son. A classmate recalls a bit of the Fonda home life down on the farm. "We were all afraid of Jane's father in those days. We always felt he was a time bomb ready to explode. But it was years later when we actually saw him lose his temper over some forgotten trivia. He was booming, purple-faced, with veins sticking out on his temples. It was the only time I was ever privileged to see what may have been a constant for Lady Jane."
The "lady" was a chain that Jane had to drag around all through school. The very name tapes on her clothes read "Lady Fonda," and she was referred to at home as "Lady Jayne." It was not until the Fondas moved east for Mr. Roberts that Jane shook off the adult humor. Her family had preceded the Hay wards to Greenwich, Conn., and Brooke Hayward noisily greeted her old classmate: "Lady Jayne!" "My name is Jane," came the icy reply. "J-A-N-E." Peter chose his own way of self-expression. "I wrote I HATE THE EAST on the walls of the houses we moved into, and then my father would make me go around and erase it all."
Less than a year after Frances' death, Henry the widower married Susan Blanchard, stepdaughter of Oscar Hammerstein II. They honeymooned on St. John's in the Virgin Islands, free from the family and the phone. Peter, 10, chose that moment to aim a gun at his stomach and pull the trigger. The slug went through his liver. "I don't know if I was trying to commit suicide or not," says Peter. "Since then, the idea has occurred to me many times to do my self up, but righteously."
The Coast Guard fetched Henry to the bedside; Peter miraculously bounced back. He never lost that elasticity. In prep school, one of the masters developed an interesting theory about the boy's father. "Anybody who's been married all those times has got to be a son of a bitch," he reasoned. Peter knocked the teacher down and out.