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She split to Paris for an extended fling, until Henry recalled her to New York. Together, father and daughter did some stock turns, but acting was strictly kicks until she enrolled at the Actors Studio in New York. "The only reason I took you," said the Method guru, Lee Strasberg, "was your eyes. There was such a panic in the eyes."
She attacked her craft with monomaniacal zeal. "I have never seen any one involve herself so much," says Brooke. "She worked at it five days a week. Between classes she took modern-dancing lessons, psychoanalysis and massages." Her attack on her background was equally relentless. She became inseparable from Andreas Voutsinas, the actor Mel Brooks carefully chose to play the insinuating homosexual in his comedy The Producers.
Different strokes for different folks, said the Fonda watchers; Jane has a more rational explanation. "There is always a period when a child is looking for its own identity. The stronger the father figure, the harder the fight to break away. During that period, Peter and I had access to the press. We would go ruff, ruff, and that would develop into a big deal."
Intimations of Mortality The kids played ruff almost every where they went. Peter unrestrainedly spieled about the girl whose abortion he had arranged — and made necessary — the drugs he took, the lousy pic- tures he made. He claimed that when he first viewed Tammy and the Doc- tor, he vomited. The bombing of The Victors and Lilith did not sweeten a pesonality that seemed to have sand under its skin. Reality was to be fled; Peter became the acidhead of the house. "In those days, it wasn't an il legal drug," he says. "It was pure, non-chromosome-breaking, non-habit-forming, nondangerous. So I dropped 500 micrograms and never came back.
That's what I like to say, 'cause then people say, 'See, see, I told you, he never came back.' I was looking to get my head straight. And it helped."
During the process, while Peter was visiting him in Tucson, Stormy MacDonald slashed his wrists, then shot himself. Mother, girlfriend, best man — all suicides. Intimations of mortality began to cling to Peter. Nothing he said seemed edited by his brain. His sister had gath- ered a barefoot-in-St.-Tropez reputation as Director Roger Vadim's newest protegee. When Henry objected to Jane and Roger's live-in arrangements, Peter announced, "Father was living in Malibu and the only difference was that he'd send his chick home at night. His duplicity blew our minds."
Through it all Henry retained a stoic but visibly worn exterior. Audiences who saw him as the President in Fail Safe or the Secretary of State in Advise and Consent thought his face showed lines of global tension. They were only signs of middle-aged fatherhood. "I knew those two children were going to be rebellious if their old man was suc- cessful at something and they decided to do the same thing," he sighs. "I had to hold my breath sometimes and not let it hurt too much."