Brutal family secret that explains why Jane Fonda has awful taste in men
JANE FONDA’S father was cold and a bully, not to mention a shameless womaniser, but — too young to understand mental illness — his daughter always blamed the alarming behaviour of her manic depressive mother for the break-up of her parents’ marriage. The future Hollywood sex symbol, Left-wing firebrand and fitness queen felt abandoned by a mother who seemed to have time only for her little brother, Peter.
But when her mother — the beautiful but fragile new york socialite Frances Ford Seymour, Fonda’s second wife — was allowed home briefly from a psychiatric institution (shadowed by nurses because she was on suicide watch), she called out desperately for Jane. But the 12-year-old hid upstairs.
Frances didn’t see her daughter that day, but she did manage to distract her nurses long enough to slip a tiny razor into her pocket. A week later, on her 42nd birthday in April 1950, she shut herself in a bathroom at the hospital and used the razor to kill herself by slashing her throat from ear to ear.
Unperturbed, Henry Fonda performed on Broadway that night as usual. He didn’t even give their two children the farewell letters their mother had written them, and insisted that she had died of a heart attack.
Always outspoken, Jane Fonda is making headlines once more after she returned to the subject of her tragic mother at the weekend, in a speech at a fundraising event in Beverly Hills for a rape victims’ charity.
The audience of philanthropists and activists was stunned when the 76-year- old actress revealed that her mother had killed herself after being sexually abused from the age of eight.
After looking through her mother’s medical records, Jane discovered her terrible secret. She said: ‘The minute that I read that, everything fell into place.’
She didn’t say who had been responsible, but made clear it explained a lot. ‘I knew [the reason for] the promiscuity, the endless plastic surgery, the guilt, the inability to love or be intimate, and I was able to forgive her and forgive myself,’ she said.
Friends say that her mother’s suicide was the single most formative event in Fonda’s multifaceted life.
In truth, however, abuse allegedly suffered by her mother during her childhood is just one of many unpleasant details in the history of the Hollywood acting dynasty.
Henry FONDA was a rising star in 1936 when he met Frances on the set of a British film, Wings of The Morning, which he was making in denham, Buckinghamshire. After a whirlwind romance, she chivvied him into getting married.
Frances was the daughter of an American industrialist whose family claimed ancestry from Henry VIII’s third wife Jane Seymour – a fact that was reflected in Jane Fonda’s full name being Lady Jayne Seymour Fonda.
Jane Fonda has told friends she believes her mother was sexually abused by a piano tuner. She believe the ordeal left Frances traumatised, and turned her into a promiscuous adolescent who had nine abortions before Jane was born. Her first, much older husband, businessman George Brokaw, was a violent alcoholic who beat her savagely.
As a mother of two young chil- dren, the flighty and self-absorbed Frances ignored her daughter, who she left to be brought up by nannies. Her father was no better, preferring to fly kites with the movie star Jimmy Stewart than spend time with his children.
Although he played many of cinema’s most memorable ‘heroic’ roles, in films such as 12 Angry Men and The Grapes of Wrath, off- screen, Fonda was a useless father and unfaithful husband.
Frances was diagnosed with bipolar disorder after the birth of Peter in 1940.
discovering that her husband was cheating on her with other women, Frances went to desperate lengths to regain his attention. She would walk around naked in front of him and even crawl on her hands and knees to him, begging him to talk to her. It didn’t work.
Moving from Los Angeles to new york when Fonda got a role on Broadway, Frances sank further into depression — and her behaviour became ever more alarming to her young children.
Terrified she was losing her looks, she would spend hours in her darkened bedroom, wearing a chin strap and eye pads to keep her skin youthful. She had plastic surgery long before it was commonplace, and once confided to Jane that if she ever put on weight, she would cut it off with a knife.
She finally went over the edge in 1949 when Fonda asked for a divorce to marry his 20-year- old mistress, Susan Blanchard.
Frances suffered a mental breakdown and had repeated stays in psychiatric hospitals, sometimes being confined in a straitjacket.
rather than comfort a woman who was descending into madness, her husband’s main concern was for the damage it would cause to his career if word got out his wife was in a ‘loony bin’.
Weeks before being placed on suicide watch, Frances stayed with a friend in Manhattan who, one night, caught her staring wildeyed into the mirror.
‘I wonder where the jugular vein is?’ she murmured as she caressed her throat. It was a horribly prescient remark.
Jane Fonda only learned the awful truth about her mother’s suicide months later when a fellow school pupil showed her a report in a film magazine. Her brother Peter didn’t know for years.
By then, having been packed off to boarding school where she had nightmares every night about her dead mother, Jane wrote to her father about her terrors.
Henry returned her letters with her grammatical errors highlighted in red ink, refusing ever to discuss the suicide.
Jane inherited her mother’s obsession with her looks. She became a teenage bulimic, a condition that was aggravated by her perfectionist father, who would badger her continually — and unfairly — that she was getting fat.
Jane has said that she was ‘made to feel I would not be loved unless I was perfect’.
As she admits, her icy father instilled in her a desperate obsession with pleasing men.
described as a chameleon even by her own children, Jane radically transformed herself to suit the controlling men in her life. French film director roger Vadim, whom she married in 1965, cemented her sex symbol image with the sci-fi film Barbarella.
Jane has described him as a ‘nicer version of my father’, which — given that Vadim was an alcoholic, gambler and compulsive philanderer — was a damning verdict on Henry. They enjoyed an image as one of the world’s most glamorous couples.
However, Vadim — the exhusband of Brigitte Bardot — had persuaded Jane to accept an open marriage. According to her, it started when he brought home a red-headed high-class call girl.
Stifling her anger and jealousy, she subsequently ‘threw myself into the sex’.
She duly started picking up girls for threesomes, or more.
‘I took my cues from him and threw myself into the threesome with the skill and enthusiasm of the actress I am,’ says Jane. ‘I was doing it to keep a man happy.’
BUT Vadim made no secret of the fact that he regarded Jane as a second-rate Bardot. His infidelity, and her growing attraction to radical politics, ended their marriage after eight years.
next, she wed Left-wing activist Tom Hayden after meeting during her fateful visit to north Vietnam in 1972. Many Americans will never forgive ‘Hanoi Jane’ for her anti-war stance.
As with Vadim, Jane sacrificed herself for Hayden, who made her live in a small bungalow in California and do all the laundry by hand, because he didn’t approve of washing machines.
Friends say he resented her fame, but he happily lived off the money it brought to launch his political career.
After she discovered Hayden was cheating on her, she was snapped up by Ted Turner, founder of the Cnn TV channel. A notorious womaniser, he forced her to give up acting and become a trophy wife.
A month after their wedding, she discovered he had a mistress. But it was her new-found Christianity that finally ended their ten-year marriage when Turner left her.
She appears finally to have found contentment with her current partner, music producer richard Perry, with whom she has been since 2009. But still, the memory of her mother’s suicide still haunts her.
As Jane confided to a friend, she was once afraid that she, too, might kill herself, but she later realised that she never would.
Why? ‘Because life is too damn interesting, and I think I’m too important.’