Jane Fonda’s Dishy Memoir Proves She Walks the Walk

The Lone Ranger

Throughout her childhood, Jane Fonda had a mantra: “Make it better. I know I can make it better.”

She was born Lady Jayne Seymour Fonda—yes, her first name is literally Lady—on December 21, 1937, in New York City. An original nepo baby, she was the daughter of wealthy socialite Frances Ford Seymour and movie star Henry Fonda, whose progressive views and sensitive, everyman roles in films like The Grapes of Wrath made him an offscreen hero.

Growing up in Los Angeles, tomboy Jane—tough, tireless, infinitely curious—would do anything to gain her father’s approval. “He was happy with me when I was little,” she writes, “and deep down I knew his was the winning team, the one I’d do anything to join.”

But as she got older, her father’s cold, distant personality and his “Protestant rages” made him impossible to reach. Fonda mimicked him, becoming insular, self-sufficient and obsessed with perfection. Once the family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, when Fonda was ten, the tense family situation went from bad to worse. Her mother Frances—whom Fonda compares to the beautiful pinned butterflies she mounted as home decor—succumbed to a long battle with mental illness.

In 1949, Henry had left Frances and would eventually marry Susan Blanchard, whom Fonda credits as a wonderful stepmother. Her mother, meanwhile, spent years in and out of mental health facilities. Fonda writes about the day her mother came home to briefly visit the children while under the care of a psychiatric hospital. While her emotionally open brother, Peter, went downstairs to see her, an angry Jane refused. “I never saw her again,” Fonda writes. “She must have known it would be her last time home. She’d come, I guess, to say good-bye—but also to get the small razor that she kept in a black enamel box.”

Frances died by suicide at the Craig House Corporation Sanatorium on April 14, 1950. The children were told she’d died of a heart attack. Fonda never cried, but her grief was evident when she screamed for her mother in her sleep. She discovered the truth about her mother’s death when a classmate handed her a movie magazine in study hall. “Maybe she knew I didn’t love her and that’s why she did it,” Fonda writes. “But did I love her or didn’t I? I couldn’t answer that, because some part of my heart had been tumbled into numbness.”