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Jane became the sexual rebel, triumphantly denouncing marriage, ap- pearing topless, and on occasion bottomless, in films. Such Vadim-witted flicks as The Game Is Over were 25% titillation, 75% marzipan; but because they were 100% Jane, they were worth while. Even the overblown Barbarella had style when she was on, peeling her futuristic armor to stand nude before an elderly gentleman. "Barbarella," he nodded. "Mr. President," she replied.
"Daughter? I don't have a daughter," Fonda once said during Jane's Francophile period. He refused to see some of her pictures, and never did get around to attending her wedding when she and Vadim decided to make it legal in 1965.
There seemed an extra conviction in his performance in the Broadway com- edy Generation that year. It was about the father of a headstrong girl and an undesirable son-in-law.
Moral Support Onscreen, Jane had sex cornered. Violence became Peter's bag. His big role was the vicious cyclist in The Wild Angels, and personality posters' big number was Fonda on a chopper. Two million of the posters were sold, claims Peter, three of them to their subject. "I looked at them on the wall of my house and decided it was the hang-up of the people who bought them, not mine." Peter's private life remained astonishingly placid; his marriage seemed to have everything his father's four marriages had lacked. He referred to his wife as "my old lady." They presented Henry with his first two grandchildren.
His conversation remained free association. On occasion, the subject turned to drugs. It was uncool in a state whose government likes to see its grass mowed, not smoked. While Grandpa was making a movie appropriately entitled Welcome to Hard Times, he made an unscheduled appearance beside Peter in a Los Angeles courtroom. The charge: narcotics possession. "I'm here," said Henry, "to give moral support or any other support to my son." The case was dismissed, but the experience, recalls Henry, "shook Peter real good, and it should have."
Business went on as usual during altercations. Henry married a fifth time, to Shirlee Adams, a willowy ex-airline stewardess. "Henry is a very moral man," paradoxically concludes his third wife, Susan Blanchard. "If he were not, he wouldn't have been married so many times." Remarriage, observed Samuel Johnson, is the triumph of hope over experience. If Henry was moral, he was also congenitally optimistic.
He delightedly learned that the generation gap was not a Fonda exclusive. He resisted his son's sales talk on drugs and his daughter's on psychoanalysis, but he tried some self-analysis and reached a shrewd conclusion: "I'm a self-conscious person, and I'm an actor because I don't have to be myself."
The kids made vaster, faster metamorphoses. "I did two things," says Jane. "I had a baby and I made Horses. I went into pregnancy at 31. It felt like I could be destroyed. I was afraid. When Vanessa started growing in me, I got hooked. I'm a late starter. It has taken me a long time to get it together."