My Life So Far (17 page)

I was mysteriously popular at the dance. Lots of boys cut in, probably because they wanted to see what the body cast felt like up against their chests and bellies. I, on the other hand, wanted to feel their chests and bellies against mine, but the titillation of those first swelling, through-your-clothing body contacts would have to wait.

Fall came and it was time to return to Emma Willard, this time wearing maternity clothes because of the cast. The good news was that I didn’t have to take phys ed. The bad news had to do with breasts. It seemed everyone had them by now except me. Of course, I hadn’t had them two months earlier, when the doctors had put the cast on, but they’d left me no growing room and there was no
give
to the plaster. If my breasts
were
trying to grow, I was sure they’d be stunted permanently. Now it wasn’t just a faulty vagina I would have to deal with but breasts that grew inward!

I
finally got my period the summer of 1954, when I was sixteen and a half. After all my concerns about it, when it finally came I assumed it was a terrifying sign that I was bleeding to death from a wound in my faulty vagina. Susan woke me to the reality that I was menstruating. She held a towel for me to wrap myself in, handed me a Kotex pad to stick between my legs, and as I stepped out of the shower threw her arms around me, saying, “Oh, Jane, congratulations. You’re a woman now!”
A woman?
While her words eased my fear of imminent death from blood loss, I felt another anxiety rise.

Woman? But I don’t want to be a woman. Women are destroyed.

That afternoon Susan told me that I needed to establish a relationship with a gynecologist—she knew a very good one. She also told me that since I was now able to become pregnant, I ought to discuss birth control with the doctor and I should consider my relationship with him totally confidential. “I hope you will not have sex, Jane,” she added. “You’re still too young. But you need to know about contraception.” What a smart stepmother! She did what every mother or stepmother should do when their daughters begin to menstruate.

His name was Dr. Lazar Margulies and he would be the pioneer of the now-famous spiral-shaped, plastic IUD. I burst into tears the moment I sat down in his office and began to describe to him all my fears about my down there, all the years of pent-up anxiety, the “Christine Jorgensen, I think I’m meant to be a man” worry—all of it came sobbing out of me. Clearly, he was used to seeing adolescents with fears and questions and listened to me with great patience. It was wonderful to have someone professional who wouldn’t judge me, someone to whom I could address these difficult questions. Every child should be so lucky. When the time came for my examination, I squeezed my eyes tight and held my breath while he did what gynecologists do. And when he pronounced me 100 percent normal I burst into tears again—this time out of relief.

We discussed the available contraceptive choices: The pill hadn’t yet arrived, but there were diaphragms and copper IUDs. I liked the idea of an IUD, because I didn’t have to worry about putting a diaphragm in correctly. The decision was made then and there.

I remember times at Emma Willard when someone would pass around a list of every sexual act we could imagine, and we’d check off what we’d done. Carol Bentley could check off just about everything: French kissing, intercourse, oral sex, and all sorts of other things that made my breathing change just talking about them. I was in awe of her. All I’d done was kiss (no tongue) and pet, so I’d check off things I hadn’t done, like French kissing and intercourse. Junior and senior year I had two boyfriends (one after the other), and with each one I tried to have intercourse. But in spite of all the huffing and puffing and rug burns, it didn’t work. My body didn’t seem receptive, it wouldn’t let them in. Despite my doctor’s assurances, this gave me a new reason to think something was wrong with me.

CHAPTER EIGHT

WAITING FOR MEANING

—L
OUISE
J. K
APLAN,
psychologist

D
URING THE YEARS
after Emma Willard and before becoming an actor, I was basically just treading water—waiting for meaning. I’m rumored to have done some wild things: ridden a motorcycle into a bar, danced on a table while stripping, setting a fire in the dorm. At Vassar, where we supposedly had to wear gloves and pearls to dinner (untrue), I’m said to have flouted the rules by coming downstairs in gloves and pearls and nothing else.
Moi!
I confess to having harbored a fondness for shocking, but frankly I never had that kind of chutzpah. My life outside of school was very different from the other girls’. They could just call up and meet friends at the local drive-in; they had boyfriends they jitterbugged with at sock hops in their basements. I didn’t do any of those things. The reflected glamour of being Henry Fonda’s daughter, who lived in New York City and could put on a good façade, made people think I was more experienced and sophisticated than I was.

To make up for what I lacked, I borrowed bits and pieces of other people’s personae and wove them together into large enough patches of personality to get by on dates or at parties. Only when I was comfortable with someone would I garnish this carefully constructed persona with my uniqueness, but generally I looked and behaved as conventionally as seersucker, blending perfectly into the flat, Ozzie-and-Harriet-Kelvinator-Wonder-Bread, predigested world of the fifties.

Acting never beckoned. I was too self-conscious and never heard anyone—certainly not my father—talk about getting emotional fulfillment from acting. I never connected acting with
joy.
In fact, I had developed a philosophy: “Actors are too egotistical. I have problems enough. I don’t want to encourage my self-centeredness—it’s not for me.” In truth I thought of myself as fat and boring, and I was scared to death of failure.

The summer after my last year at Emma Willard, the family went to Europe, where my father was filming
War and Peace
in Rome with Audrey Hepburn. That summer Susan decided she’d had enough of the lonely marriage, and she told Dad she wanted a divorce.

“I couldn’t be myself,” she told Howard Teichmann. “I wanted to discuss problems with him, and he’d turn a deaf ear. He had an ability to avoid confrontations with me. . . . [But when] his anger broke out it was terrifying. Slowly it dawned on me that I had always been afraid of this man.” And slowly she had come to realize that what she had taken in the beginning for charming shyness was a more clinical rigidity that, try as she might, she could not break through. She told me that Dad would go all day without speaking to her and then, buoyed by male entitlement, hop into bed at night and expect her to make love with him.

“I’m not a machine, Jane,” she said sadly. She had begged him to go into therapy with her and he’d refused. When she went to a therapist on her own (to address her bulimia), Dad told her she’d have to pay for it herself.

Susan was helping me see that what I had witnessed in my father for so long was neither imagined nor my fault. Here was a woman who, unlike my mother, was able to walk away rather than continue to live in a superficial relationship—walk away not to another man but to
herself.
She was his third wife, but introspection and professional help weren’t Dad’s way or his generation’s way. As a result, he was married again in less than two years, to an Italian woman he met during the filming in Rome. That marriage, his fourth, would last not even four years.

Susan had come into our lives, and now she was going. But Peter and I would be forever grateful for what she had brought us.

I
n 1955 I was accepted at Vassar College (I had applied because Carol Bentley was going there) and went with Peter, Dad, and Aunt Harriet to spend the next summer in Hyannis Port, on Cape Cod. Dad had just completed filming
12 Angry Men,
Sidney Lumet’s first time directing a feature film (Sidney would go on to direct such greats as
Serpico
and
Dog Day Afternoon
). The rental house was located just behind the Kennedy compound. Since Dad knew the Kennedys, we saw them from time to time. To say they were like royalty is a cliché, but it’s the truth.

The Dennis Playhouse was in easy driving distance from our house and had a summer apprenticeship program that Dad felt might interest me, at least the backstage, scenery-making part of it. While some acting classes were involved and the apprentices were sometimes given the opportunity to play small roles in the professional summer stock productions that came through on tour, the decision to enroll me in the program was in no way meant as encouragement for me to become an actress. Dad made that clear to both Peter and me: Acting was a very difficult profession to succeed in. He had too many friends who’d ended up performing at auto shows.

On the first day of the program, we were introduced to the stage manager, James Franciscus, whom everyone called Goey, and the moment I saw him the complexion of the summer changed. He was blond, blue-eyed, and movie-star handsome; in fact, he later became something of a star, playing the lead in such television series as
Naked City
and
Mr. Novak
and in thirty-some movies. As it happened, he was also a sophomore at Yale. I was smitten. My previous inarticulate philanderings had not prepared me for true romance, and I was very shy with him. Goey, I would soon discover, may have looked like a playboy, but he was shy, too.

Goey supervised the apprentices, so there was ample opportunity for us to be together. It soon became apparent that my interest in him was reciprocated. We talked a lot. I discovered there were things about Goey to like beyond his looks and the fact that he went to Yale: He was smart and literate; he had a sense of humor, lived in New York City, and was a preppy (only by virtue of Yale), but didn’t belong to a fraternity. His family wasn’t rich, he had to work, he didn’t love football, and he had a passion. Other boys I’d liked had hobbies but no passion. Goey’s passion was an epic drama he was writing in iambic pentameter. When he read me what he’d written so far, about a third of the entire piece, it seemed heroic and profound.

Peter, Susan holding Amy (the daughter Susan and Dad had adopted at birth), me, and Dad en route to Rome, where he filmed War and Peace.

(Bettmann/Corbis)