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Stalag 17½ Peter was 16, a vibrant, defensive manic-about-town. He tried to slow him self down with barbiturates; to little avail. His sister once found him babbling outside school to a bunch of dogs and dubbed him a spaced-out Holden Caulfield. Peter loved, he thought, a girl named Bridget, Brooke Hayward's sister. She took her own life the same year he quit the University of Omaha.
College proved like too much. Or not enough. "I split before that scene went down." he recalls. "I went into summer stock. I did everything I had to do, all I could, majoring in liberal arts and ab normal psych."
Summer stock was in Fishkill, N.Y.
Henry's kid had done theatrical bits in prep school; he had even performed in his own satire, Stalag 17 ½. Now he worked the lights and learned, just like another kid did 30 years before. At 21, he won a part in a Broadway service comedy. Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole. Mr. Poole was no Mr. Roberts, but Peter was called another Henry, and it bugged him. "I can hear them in the front row," he griped. " 'It's your old man all over again.' " By the time Peter had made it on stage, his sister was swinging in Hollywood. The sibling revelry turned into solo performances. "It was a time when we weren't very close," recalls Jane.
"Peter had very short hair and insisted on getting married in a big church ceremony. I didn't understand his life and he didn't understand my friends." Peter admits, "I was trying to grab all the straight paraphernalia — the country club, have a silver pattern register at Tiffany's." His new wife, Susan, was the stepdaughter of Noah Dietrich, an ex-assistant of Howard Hughes. His best man was a young millionaire named Eugene ("Stormy") McDonald.
If an ironist were to select a trio diametrically opposed to the Fondas of today he could do no better than to choose the Fondas of 1960. Henry had married a fourth time, to an Italian countess, Afdera. He became unrecognizably Bonifaced. Leland Hayward attended one dinner party for Afdera's friend. "For dessert they had ice cream and chocolate sauce. There was dancing, and all of a sudden those nutty Italians began throwing ice cream and sauce on the walls. I thought Hank would commit murder. But he just stood there and smiled and enjoyed it."
Peter may have been playing Master Wonderful. But Jane ... In the sixth grade in Connecticut, Brooke remembers, "there was this shed on the school grounds where we all used to go to listen to Jane tell her dirty traveling-sales men stories." At Vassar, she made reality out of wistful thinking. Jane once discovered that school administrators knew she was AWOL. She telephoned, crying. "But before I got a chance to say I was sorry," she recalled, "the professor said he understood that my father had just married for the fourth time and that I was emotionally upset.
I wasn't. I'd just gone away with a boy for the weekend." And from Vassar soon afterward.