A Quiet Evening with the Family

It is evening in Bel Air, Calif, Peter, Henry and Jane Fonda sprawl on a broad couch in the library of Henry's handsome house. Opposite them are TIME'S Mary Cronin, Jonathan Larsen and Jay Cocks. Red Eric beer foams in glasses on the coffee table. A tape recorder runs. Jane sums it up as the conversation develops: "This is really one of the first times in as long as I can remember that the three of us have been together and talked about acting." For the last half-hour of the session, Peter lambastes the Establishment press in general, and TIME in particular, for distortion of the truth. Henry listens in silence until Peter seems to be attacking the correspondents personally; then he explodes and delivers a furious lecture on manners. At that moment, Jane said later, "I felt like I was three years old all over again." Mainly, however, the talk was lively, friendly and enlightening:

JANE: I think there are very rare, genius actors that believe totally what they're playing. I am sure Eleanora Duse was that way. She became Juliet. I know it has happened to me--there will be just one scene where you don't have to work on it. You just believe. HENRY: It is easier to grow in the theater than it is in films, because you have more time to let it grow. You rehearse for four weeks--I call it "baby up on a part." When the script is out of your hands, you can begin to put the breath and the blood into the character. I don't think of myself as the character. I think of the guy that the playwright wrote.

PETER: I get my licks because I approach movies on a much broader scale than just as an actor. Before, I felt stultified by the flick. You gotta hit this mark, you gotta remember which hand you pick this up in and which hand you put that down in. When I am conceiving the part, then I am the writer Dad was talking about. I have already thought about the part, so I am really doing all that thing myself. JANE: When it really works in the theater, then there is nothing more exciting than the immediate response from the audience. PETER: Orgasm.

JANE: But I haven't got the discipline or the technique. Having to do it every night for me was death. What Dad does I am totally in awe of. TIME'S JAY COCKS: Do you three make it a point to see what the others are doing?

HENRY: Not a point of it. PETER: I haven't seen Boston Strangler. HENRY: Neither did I. [Laughter.] I want to see it because Jane wrote me one of the nicest fan letters I ever got when she saw it in Paris. I don't like to see myself on the screen. I don't like the sound of my voice.

PETER: Ah! That's right! I feel exactly the same way.

JANE: It is so different with me. I see every movie I do. I don't ever see them twice if I can help it. but I always see them once. And I learn so much by seeing them. I don't like the way I look either, except that I don't look at it as me. I look at it as a character that I'm playing. COCKS: Any reason why there aren't any Fellinis in this country? PETER: There are some people in this country that get it off. Have you seen

Bob Downey? I mean Putney Swope is a little sophomoric, but it was pretty good. I wouldn't have been embarrassed to make that flick.

JANE: European directors study American movies with a seriousness that American film directors don't. Truffaut or Godard are essentially outcroppings of American film making. What Truffaut wants to make is a Hitchcock picture. But they can't do our stuff, and that is why our stuff impresses them so much. It makes me mad when people get discouraged about American movies. I think we have incredible problems to deal with--like the financial, the fact that the director isn't a master, and it is not even the producer that is head of the studio.

PETER: That's not true! Wait a minute! Whoa!

JANE: I did a movie where I did not want to wear falsies, and they told me I had to because Jack Warner doesn't like flat-chested women. [Peter laughs.] I mean, can you believe that? I said I wanted to wear a polka-dot dress, and they said Jack Warner doesn't like polka dots.

PETER: I don't think Europeans make better films. First of all, they can't even keep their Johns clean. I went to dub Easy Rider in Rome and--HENRY: I think Europeans are better, but I'm glad to hear you and Jane deny it. I'm not that much of a fan of Hitchcock. When you say that Truffaut is imitating Hitchcock and hasn't been able to--I thought Truffaut was better.

JANE: On the other hand, there's Mike Nichols, who is in awe of Truffaut and tries to imitate him.

PETER: My own respect for American films has to do with my own identity with American films. I will kick Jack Warner in the ass. Lew Wasserman used to be my father's agent. What is he going to tell me? He knows how to make films? Bull. He knows how to make contracts. [Henry laughs.] TIME'S JON LARSEN: Since you get bumped off at the end of Easy Rider and Jane gets bumped off in They Shoot Horses, how do you feel about violence in films? Do the Charlie Mansons go watch movies like this and freak out? JANE: We know what Charlie Manson read. Now that book is not a negative book, by any manner of means. But I mean--a psychotic can get hold of anything and make it work to his own interests. Stranger in a Strange Land* It's just a title.

PETER: In which Dad should play Jub Harshaw, Jane should play Jill the nurse, and I should play Valentine Smith. JANE: He read the book, and that's what gave him the whole business of the group family and the incredible orgies and all that kind of thing. PETER: They weren't incredible. COCKS: They were just regular, g old family orgies. JANE: What Peckinpah wanted to do in The Wild Bunch, from what I read, was for once not just to show violence but to show it in such a way that you really felt what it must be like to die. PETER: That is absolutely not true, think he knew, going in, that it wasn't true. I think he knew he was making violence in such an acceptable form that we would all groove on it as voyeurs. I was put down by my longhair, freaked-out friends, who said, "Man, you have violence in Easy Rider." But the violence I put in Easy Rider was unacceptable because it was unexpected. The violence in The Wild Bunch was expected and totally acceptable. When it is acceptable, you have already dealt with it in some past experience. The shootout. COCKS: How about asking each of you whether you are conscious of having an individual image on the screen, something that you represent to people? HENRY: Well, I'm aware of it only because I hear people talk about me. Joe Mankiewicz recently cast me in a picture because, he said, "I want that middle-class American morality that is Henry Fonda."

PETER: My image--I don't know. All do is want to create questions in the minds of the audience. I just want them to say Why? or What? JANE: I don't think I have an image, and when people try to give me one I think they're making a mistake. COCKS: How about images like the first family of American cinema? PETER: We're not.

JANE: I think it is very nice. Terrific. It's unusual that three people in the same family have made it. PETER: No, it's not nice at all. If that makes us special, let's find another family, quick.

*Robert A. Heinlein's science-fiction novel about a human reared on Mars who returns to earth cheerfully prepared to eliminate anyone who stands in the way of his propagation of a superior race (TIME, Jan. 19).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.