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Peter abruptly realized what, as well as who, his father was. "Acting is putting on a mask," Henry had once confessed. "The worst torture to me is not having a mask to get in back of." The trouble was, no one had ever written a part for Henry the father. Both kids cursed their childhoods; yet their closest friends are from those anguished years. Brooke Hayward is Jane's confidante: her brother Bill is Peter's partner. Jane rebuilt a 140-year-old farmhouse 35 miles west of Paris as meticulously as Henry had once worked on the Brentwood place. She brought in full-grown trees. "They don't cost as much as an evening dress," she says, "and they last a lifetime." Peter even tried to buy back the Brentwood haunt his father had sold in 1947. Today Peter understands the move: "Looking back on it now, I can see you don't blow Mr. Roberts for a house, you blow the house for Mr. Roberts." When his son learned that Henry was campaigning for Eugene McCarthy, he swore: "It blows my mind. I won't have to send him poison-pen letters in the press."
Greyhounds Between Races Habit cannot be thrown out the window; it has to be coaxed downstairs one step at a time. Henry has never doted. His was an old family, traceable back through Holland to Italy — and Henry is most comfortable in the role of the tight-lipped senior aristocrat. He belongs to Manhattan's Raffles club and maintains a town house in New York.
"People think you're rich because you live well," he says. "But you have to put up a good front if you're a star." The frontage feeds on constant employment. The Fonda annuity may just turn out to be the other Fondas.
Both children have become astonishing refractions of his spirit. Relaxation for both will never be defined in customary terms of lolling or woolgathering. At rest, both suggest greyhounds between races. But the energy no longer dissipates itself in showy cloudbursts. The old-model Jane used to welcome an entourage on the farm or at the Vadim pad on the beach at Malibu. For the heavy work in They Shoot Horses, she quit the crowded homestead and holed up with her baby in a trailer on the set. There was sex in her performance, but she was no longer the kitten from Cat Ballou or the dirty blonde of The Game Is Over. "She had," says Joshua Logan, "her father's unseducibility."
For the first time, Jane realized Henry's philosophy: less is more. "You have to keep some of the mystery," she concludes, in life as well as art. "If you bring a plastic penis into the classroom as they do in Sweden, that removes all the mystery. If you go to bed with Human Sexual Response under your arm, things can get very boring." The new unseducibility does not end at the set. Confesses Vadim: "I do much more giving than Jane. In a way, in our relationship she is the man and I am the woman." Her attitude on marriage remains a bit like Dad's: "Forever is a very difficult word."