Playboy Interview: Peter Fonda

As we enter the Seventies, the decade's first authentic cult hero has already emerged: Peter Fonda, who personifies--on screen and off--the radical life style that has gained increasing currency among young Americans. Not since James Dean's "Rebel Without a Cause" and Marlon Brando's "The Wild One" has a movie actor so captured the imagination and admiration of a generation. In "Easy Rider," Fonda projected the polarized mood of young America with such forcefulness that the film has become a requiem for the short-lived Aquarian Age.

Though his new-found superstardom was catalyzed by "Easy Rider"--which he conceived, produced, co-authored and acted in--popular success had long eluded him. In fact, until "Easy Rider" was released in the summer of 1969, Fonda's career had been a monumental bust. But not without cause: Son of one of America's most celebrated actors, Fonda was born in New York City and spent his early years being shuffled in and out of various schools on the East Coast, in California and Europe. When he was ten, Peter's mother (Henry Fonda's second wife, socialite Frances Seymour Brokaw), confined to a mental institution, committed suicide by slashing her throat. Several months later, Peter also tried to commit suicide--by shooting himself in the stomach.

Fonda's adolescence was a classic in the annals of teenage maladjustment. He began drinking at 14 and, two years later, was bounced out of an exclusive prep school for punching a teacher in the mouth. The widening generation gap between him and his father had by that time become unbridgeable and Peter went to Omaha to live with his father's sister and brother-in-law. He remained there for more than three years, by which time his sister Jane was gaining fame as an actress; Peter decided to give acting a try himself and began appearing in plays at the University of Omaha and the Omaha Community Playhouse. By the time he was 21, he had received good notices for his first Broadway role (in "Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole"); six days after the play opened, he married Susan Brewer, a Sarah Lawrence student he had met in California.

Peter and his wife headed for Hollywood soon after "Stanley Poole" folded early in its 1961 run. Fonda's first movie role was in "Tammy and the Doctor," which he instantly rechristened "Tammy and the Schmuckface"; he didn't think much of the movie and said so publicly, Next came Carl Foreman's "The Victors," in which he played "a dude who loves a dog--I could have done the role blindfolded." In "Lilith," Peter finally impressed the industry with his acting--but also with his capabilities as a disruptive influence on the set, where he argued constantly with star Warren Beatty. Fonda was getting to be known as a genuine kook, and after his next film, "The Young Lovers"--which gave him four flops in four tries--he was virtually persona non grata at every Hollywood studio.

As his professional life faltered, Peter's personal life--with the exception of his marriage--was reaching new lows. When he was a teenager, he'd been in love with Bridget Hayward, the daughter of theatrical producer Leland Hayward and the late Margaret Sullavan (who had been Henry Fonda's first wife); Bridget had later killed herself by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Peter was still trying lo forget that tragedy when, in 1965, Eugene (Stormy) McDonald, his best friend, shot himself to death. Fonda later commented to writer Rex Reed: "There's never a day that I don't think about my best friend putting a bullet in his head. There's hardly a day I don't think about my mother cutting her throat. There's hardly a day that I don't realize this girl whom I was in love with, and who was almost like my sister, took pills and. did herself in. And all the other people I knew who tried to do themselves in. I have no sympathy anymore. Compassion, but no sympathy."

In 1965, Peter began taking LSD, wearing his hair dozen to his shoulders, dressing exclusively in blue jeans and cowboy shirts and establishing a solid reputation as a dropout. He probably would have been finished in movies if not for American International Pictures, which specialized then in youth-exploitation films; AIP put Fonda astride a motorcycle for "The Wild Angels," which proceeded to make money and also something of an underground hero out of its star. Peter in shades riding a Hurley was soon a hot poster in virtually every head shop across the nation. Peter next starred in AIP's "The Trip," a commercially flawed depiction of an acid experience. By 1968, he had become disgusted with the exploitation-film genre. Looking for alternatives, he got the idea for "Easy Rider" and. picked another Hollywood outcast, Dennis Hopper, to direct and co-star in the film. Fonda then took off to visit Jane and her husband, director Roger Vadim, while they were filming "Barbarella" in Paris. On the set, he met scenarist Terry Southern, who volunteered to list himself as a co-author for "Easy Rider"--which would aid Fonda in raising money for the film. (Southern finally served as a part-time script supervisor, but the film's 12-page outline was written by Dennis Hopper, and almost all of the dialog was created by Hopper and Fonda.) Fonda then formed Pando Productions, assembled his collaborators and crew and hit the road with a 16mm camera and a shoestring budget of $375,000. The rest, as the cliché goes, is film history.

Convinced that multimillion-dollar budgets have been responsible not only for the movie industry's financial disintegration but also for the pablum produced by the major studios in an effort to earn back their inordinate investments, Fonda felt that gifted film makers should be allowed to produce uncompromised movies on budgets so low that profit is virtually assured, thus fostering originality and eliminating such expensive disasters as "Star!" and "Doctor Dolittle." The film industry has since emulated Fonda's example--with mixed results. To further prove his point, he recently contracted to produce, write, direct and star in a Western called "The Hired Hand"--on a budget well under $1,000,000.

Though multiplying responsibilities have made him increasingly unavailable to the press, we were able to persuade the 30-year-old actor to take time out for this exclusive interview, which was conducted at his unpretentious home in Los Angeles' Coldwater Canyon by Playboy Associate Editor Lawrence Linderman. Reports Linderman: "Adjoining the house is a swimming pool, which Fonda uses, and a tennis court, which he doesn't. The latter serves as a playground for Fonda's two children, Bridget, 6, and Justin, 4; and the family's two cats, Tiger and Fat Cat. Peter came to the door dressed in a bathrobe, introduced himself, had his wife make me some coffee and then left me alone in the living room while he went to get dressed. Like the rest of the house, the room is furnished in Goodwill Industries' moderne; it's about as far from movie-star ambiance as one can imagine. But Peter has tacked up two large advertising posters for 'Easy Rider'--one in English, one in French; and the motorcycle helmet he wore as Captain America sits atop a child's piano. I didn't notice any pictures of Jane in the room, but there was a. photo of his father on the wall near a doorway.

"When Peter reappeared 15 minutes later, I was struck by how thin he is--140 pounds stretched over a six-foot, two-inch frame. At moments, he looks exactly like his father, at times like his sister; but when he's totally involved in a subject, he resembles only himself--a disarmingly frank and friendly man with a keen nonlinear intelligence. As we sat down to begin, the first of two six-hour tapings, he received a call from his office, advising him that he was scheduled to begin a promotional tour of Japan for 'Easy Rider.' The subject provided a logical opening for our interview."

[Q] Playboy:Easy Rider has made you what used to be known in Hollywood as a "first-magnitude star." And several critics have begun to call you a "cult hero." How do you feel about those labels?

[A] Fonda: I don't give a shit about any of that stuff. Becoming a cult hero or a superstar is a suicidal step. Man. when you get to be John Wayne, you suddenly believe that you're John Wayne. He really believes that he's a superstar. He doesn't go around saying, "I'm a great actor." because that's not part of his ego. But his ego does demand that he think of himself as a superstar. That's a trap. John has removed himself from life.

[Q] Playboy: Even if you don't want to be an image hero, there's no denying that you're in a position to influence people.

[A] Fonda: Oh, sure, I'm very sensitive to that, because I find myself suddenly preaching to people. On the one hand, I say I don't want to teach or lead anybody anyplace, but I find myself preaching at them anyway.

[Q] Playboy: How do you reconcile that?

[A] Fonda: I reconcile it because it won't go any further than that. I don't want to be a leader, and though there are people who will be led by me, I'll continue to reject that. I suppose there will be people who'll say I'm speaking for them whether I want to or not, people who'll worship me whether I want them to or not. But I don't control their psyches and it would be a waste of my energy to spend my time denouncing it. All I'm saying is that I don't want to be a star. It's ironic, too, because before Easy Rider, I had just about had it with making American movies.

[Q] Playboy: What would you have done if Easy Rider hadn't happened?

[A] Fonda: Who knows, man? I knew acting; maybe I would have gone to work in summer stock--like a gypsy, move around the country. It would have been difficult on my old lady and my children, but we would have adapted. Maybe I would have gone to Europe and made some funky films, and socked the money into a farm in Madagascar and sat there growing grass and getting high for the rest of my life.

[Q] Playboy: What soured you on Hollywood?

[A] Fonda: When I started acting, I didn't mind being in straight films. Tammy and the Schmuckface was my first and it was a mistake, of course. Then I was in The Victors, an anti-war war movie, which was better because it was trying to get to something that Tammy wasn't even interested in. Then I did one called The Young Lovers that Sammy Goldwyn directed and produced about college kids; it would have been all right when he was in college, but it didn't relate to what was happening on campuses when we made the movie. I liked my performance in Lilith best of all until Easy Rider. Those were the straight flicks. Then I made The Wild Angels, a motorcycle picture I did stoned the whole time. But it wasn't until after The Trip that I considered dropping out of movies. I was really disillusioned by what happened to that film--bitterly disillusioned.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Fonda: Because American International Pictures screwed up what should have been a beautiful movie. Jack Nicholson, who is in Easy Rider, wrote the script for The Trip. I sat here reading it one night and I started to cry. My wife asked, "What's the matter, baby?" I said, "This is just so fucking beautiful you have no idea. Listen to this page of jump cuts. There's a hundred and fifteen of them just on this page. Listen." Though Susan hasn't taken acid, she knows from my own descriptions the various bombardments of images your brain manufactures. I read her the page and she got as emotional about it as I was. I said. "I don't believe it. I don't believe that I'm really going to have a chance, that I get to be in this movie. This is going to be the greatest film ever made in America." It was so beautiful--some of the ideas were so far out. Like, halfway through the film, Nicholson started to show the ending. This big light would go blink!, then, a little later, blink! blink!, and soon the blinks would get closer and closer together until that blinking light became predominant and then became the blinking light outside a motel room, where the last scene took place. When I finished reading Nicholson's script, I went to see him. We'd met a couple of times, but we didn't know each other as friends. Straight out, I said, "Listen, that's the greatest thing I've ever read. I think Fellini wrote it." "Are you serious?" he said. "You really understand it?" I said, "I understand every single fucking word of it. It's absolutely right on the nose." And we began to have meetings with the studio and with the director, Roger Corman. But after we'd signed contracts, people were suddenly talking about "clarification," and Jack and I would tell them, "Don't say that word. You don't need to clarify, no exposition, no explanation. It's a trip and that's it. It's got the right taste, the right quality, the right everything." But we didn't shoot that film. We shot a predictable film, a film with a beginning, a middle and an ending, and a moral at the end of it--it shows a frozen frame of my face and then the image shatters. I was livid.

[Q] Playboy: Did you do anything about it?

[A] Fonda: I said publicly that AIP blew it, and they really hated me for that. I was in the middle of promoting the film and I was telling everybody, "Well, the ending's a cop-out, but there's about three reels that are just unbelievable, that will batter you so much it's worth seeing the movie just to catch those three reels--including the last fuck, which is really beautiful." But that was the only thing I could sell about the film. By signing a contract and trusting AIP to make a beautiful flick, I had put my balls on the table--and they got lobbed right off. I had taken next to nothing for the film--$25,000 and five percent of profits they'll never see. I was up in Toronto, out of grass, depressed, sitting in this hotel room. And all of a sudden, Easy Rider came to me.

[Q] Playboy: How?

[A] Fonda: I was sitting around, really tired--I'd been working very hard selling their thing, and I didn't like selling the fuckin' thing. I drank a few Heineken's and popped a sleeping pill, because there was a big noisy convention of exhibitors and I wanted to fall out quick. I was a little bit loaded, and I looked at a picture that had been left on a table for me to sign for somebody's cousin. It was a photograph from The Wild Angels of me and actor Bruce Dern on a chop. I looked at the photo for a while and then thought about what it would look like if, instead of two guys on one cycle, I had each of the guys on a bike. And suddenly I thought, that's it, that's the modern Western: two cats just riding across the country, two loners, not a motorcycle gang, no Hell's Angels, nothing like that, just those two guys. And maybe they make a big score, see, so they have a lot of money. And they're gonna cross the country and go retire in Florida. Maybe they want to buy an orange ranch and grow some shit and get high. Maybe they want to get a boat and go sailing off in the Caribbean and fish and groove on an island--all the dreams that all of us have, all the escapist fantasies that all the loners have in common. Anyway, they get to Florida and they've got the money, and it's together, and they're about to get to the farm or to the boat when a couple of duck poachers in a truck rip them off 'cause they don't like the way they look.

[Q] Playboy: Just like that?

[A] Fonda: Just like that. First, the poachers get the first guy. And the second one, me, I go back and pick him up. Like Lennie says to George in Of Mice and Men, he says, "I can see it, I can see it." The guy's going crazy. He's dying, half of his insides are blown out from a shotgun blast, but he's seeing the ranch. And I drag him to my bike and strap him onto myself and he's saying, "We're gonna get there, we're gonna get there." I answer, "It's gonna be all right," and we're riding down the road and he's dying. Meanwhile, one of the guys in the truck says, "We'd better go back." The other one answers, "Yeah, you're right," and they turn around. We're riding down the road and--pow!--they kill me. The audience would think the guys were going to help us--and they were going to kill us. It would be such a shock, and it would be the end of the film. We changed a lot of details later, of course; and there was no Captain America or anything yet. But I thought, fuck, it's right, because we've got all the things that backers want: We go for dope, we go for motorcycles, we go riding across the country, we'll even get some sex here and there--but we can do all these things really honestly.

I saw it all in my mind, and to me it reflected the anarchy of the individual, which I think is beautiful, as opposed to the anarchy of society, which is so incredibly awful. The powers that make society's rules break them better than we can imagine--much better than I could by copping a joint, whether it's somebody's cock or somebody's reefer. Compare breaking rules like that with our Government denying civil rights, killing innocent people, doing nothing about the hunger and disease among the poor, destroying our environment. Dennis Hopper was the only guy crazy enough to know what I was talking about, even crazier than I am, so I called him up. I said, "What do you think?" And he says, "Man, wow, Jesus, I'm glad you called me." We had had a fight and he'd sworn never to talk to me again. "Fuck that, man," I said. "What do you think?" And he says, "Yeah, it's great." I asked him if he'd like to direct it and act in it, too, and he said, "Are you kidding?" Then he thought for a second and said, "Listen, man, the score--we gotta make it a cocaine score." Hopper was already thinking about details. I said, "Sure, man, right, a cocaine score. I'll talk to you tomorrow, when I get back to L. A." That's how Easy Rider started. I looked at that photograph and I went for it.

[Q] Playboy: What made you think that Hopper--who'd never directed a feature--could direct Easy Rider?

[A] Fonda: Dennis had directed the desert sequences in The Trip--and if he had directed the whole thing, we would have made the movie Nicholson wrote. I thought we needed the script's desert sequences--which Corman had decided not to shoot--so I told Corman that I'd gotten some cameras and a friend who could operate them and that we needed the footage. I knew that if I just asked him for some money, he'd say no, so I said I had part of it covered, and Roger bought us the film. Then I rented a camera and found a cameraman and we drove out to the desert, and Dennis directed it. I ran up and down dunes and stood there and did freaky numbers--whatever he wanted me to do. The footage was beautiful. Dennis could have done the whole movie like that, which is why I knew he'd be perfect for Easy Rider.

[Q] Playboy: Did you get together with him when you returned from Toronto?

[A] Fonda: Yes, I did. I have a home movie of how we worked: Dennis and I out on my tennis court, walking around and goofing off. That movie's funny, man; I'm long and gangly and he's short and fat and he's almost like boxing me out there, and the whole time my daughter, Bridget, is riding her tricycle in and out and between us and we don't even see her. And if I come up with a scene, you see Dennis jump up and slap my hand, and when Dennis would come up with a scene--like the lawyer being drunk in jail--I'd do the same thing. That's how we wrote the whole movie. "Dennis," I said, "we can't lose, because the movie's gonna be made so cheaply. We'll get it in for $300,000, maybe less. It'll cost so little we've got to make money. You starred in The Glory Stompers and that did $3,500,000 worth of business. I did Wild Angels and that did $16,000,000 in this country alone." We both thought this was a beautiful start, because we knew we'd prove we knew what to do, and this would mean we'd be able to do other films. I kept thinking about this 17-year-old coming up to a couple of his friends saying, "Hey, man, you got to see this flick. These guys, they smuggle coke across the border, and then they get on these chops, these wild, far-out bikes, and then they ride and they get high--I mean really get high--and at the end of the movie, well, they just get shot. Like that, man, just because they're there at the wrong time." And then the other kids are gonna go see the flick. We knew we had all the bike people who went to see The Glory Stompers and The Wild Angels in our bag and maybe a few others, too. Well, we took a crew from L. A. to New Orleans and back and it still cost us so little money--$375,000--that it just freaks out this industry.

[Q] Playboy: Was there any friction between you and Hopper while making the film?

[A] Fonda: I love Dennis no matter what difficulties went down between us, and there were difficulties at first. I think it was tough for him to relate to me as the producer. He insisted, and rightly so, that the director is the guy who runs the thing, but I think he may have felt a predisposition that I might start saying, "I gave you the job." Never. I was so happy to share my gig with somebody it was unbelievable. But that in itself very often disrupted our relationship as friends and made it difficult for us to get along all the time, and we would bark at each other. But all that will heal and mend. Much of it has already, because neither of us could have gotten it together without the other one. And we both realize that. I play a part in Dennis' new film, The Last Movie, so you can see that we're straight with each other. Of course, him directing and acting and me being the producer and acting, and moving around with about 23 people from state to state almost had to produce some tension. We went from California to Arizona to New Mexico, Texas and Louisiana. We shot the New Orleans sequences first. It took us a week, probably our most expensive week, to do the New Orleans LSD sequence, working with our friends and a 16-millimeter camera. Then we took about two months to write and prepare the rest, and then we spent six more weeks on the road completing the film. But before we went out on the road again, we saw what we'd shot in New Orleans and we knew we were going to have the film we wanted.

[Q] Playboy: What was it you wanted in the New Orleans footage?

[A] Fonda: To create an effect of disorientation and paranoia with religious overtones. Of course, the hallucination scene and the joint-smoking scene have become as cliché as the fight scene and the shootout. But we didn't make it a joint-smoking scene as such. We never said anything about it. We were just smoking. There was only one time when I said to Nicholson, who was smoking a cigarette, "You should try this; it's better for you." Every other time, we were just smoking dope, and that's all there was to it. Just as natural as we could be. But in its own way, that was spectacular--much more spectacular than in Alice B. Toklas or The Trip when we pass the joint around. In Easy Rider, this was seen as a way of life, no ritual at all.

[Q] Playboy: Hopper, Nicholson and you were the only professional actors in Easy Rider. Did you have trouble persuading local people to appear in the film?

[A] Fonda: No, not at all. Do you remember the café sequence in the movie? Well, that was in the town of Morganza, Louisiana. Dennis had been there earlier, scouting for locations, and seen this little restaurant. It had Café--Homemade Pies and Coca-Cola outside, which he dug 'cause he's a sign freak; and inside it had booths on one side with a mirror on the wall above them. All he could think of was the opening shot: The camera moves along and you can see us moving behind them in the mirror. He liked that shot. So we moved in two months later, and as we arrive, there are these guys standing around making comments. "I can smell him. You smell him?" "Yeah, I can smell him. Look at that long hair. You ever seen hair as long as that?" Dennis says, "Those are the guys." The advance men had already picked several other people who were willing to appear in the picture, and Dennis says, "No, no, I want them." And got 'em. They gave great performances, man. Dennis and I had been in the camper truck getting high, and he came out and said to these guys, "We're really bad-ass people. We raped and killed a little girl outside of town, so there's nothing that you can say about us that's too bad. You can talk about our long hair. You can talk about the beads around my neck. You can talk about how we smell. Like, you can say we're Yankee queers, anything you want to say, because we're the villains in this film; we're the heavies; we're terrible people." Well, they began rapping, man, right off the top of their heads. And it was just what we wanted.

[Q] Playboy: It wasn't difficult to get good performances out of them?

[A] Fonda: No, because the guys had been talking about "them freaks" for 20 years, and those chicks had been there all their lives drinking Coca-Cola. Dennis sat down and talked to the girls for about 20 minutes, telling them how they should be; they were the most difficult ones, because they were the most self-conscious. Finally, one of the little girls said, "You mean you-all want us to flirt with you?" And Dennis nodded. "Oh, we know how to do that." Well, they started flirting and it was beautiful. The truth was that those girls would never come outside and ask to ride with the three grubs that Dennis and Jack and I played; but in that scene, we wanted to show that youth could connect with youth in a way that transcended parental conditioning.

[Q] Playboy: How closely do each of you identify with the characters you played in Easy Rider?

[A] Fonda: Well, I'm personally into a lot more than Captain America got into. I get into discussions and arguments with people, and Captain America--a very uptight cat--would never do that; so, like, that's not my character. And Dennis, he's some parts of his character, but he's hardly just an inarticulate, paranoid goof like Billy is most of the time. Jack Nicholson was born in New Jersey and does a different gig; he's no drunken Southern A. C. L. U. lawyer.

[Q] Playboy: Which of you do you feel turned in the best performance?

[A] Fonda: Most people say Nicholson gave the best performance in the film. Well, he was certainly good, but it was also the most predictable role. I think the best performance in Easy Rider was Dennis Hopper's. His timing was perfect, he was subtle--everything was going for Dennis in that movie. He's truly one of our greatest actors, and don't let anybody tell you it's impossible to direct and act in your own film, 'cause Dennis pulled that off brilliantly. But audiences went for Jack Nicholson; they thought Hopper was crazy.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you think audiences responded so strongly to Nicholson?

[A] Fonda: Because he was someone they could identify with, who gave audiences something they could see and feel personally--and audiences went with him. We started Easy Rider very slow; there was a lot of behavior going on to explain Billy and Wyatt and their relationship and what was happening, but it was goofing around, kind of, to most of the audience. Until suddenly Jack Nicholson comes in, rides with us, gets stoned for the first time and the audience is right with us, because Jack's part--as Dennis conceived it and wrote it--was brilliant. We've lulled our audiences with beautiful scenery, great rock music, identification with Jack--and then we suddenly rip it away from them: The lawyer is killed. They have no alternative but to go with either me or Dennis after that. That was a dramatic plan on our part, even though this is intellectualizing after the fact. We felt Jack's character had to die, because he was the innocent; the only reason he got destroyed was because he was with us. If he'd gone through town on his own, they wouldn't have touched him. That's the message I wanted to put down there.

[Q] Playboy: What was the message you wanted to convey as Captain America?

[A] Fonda: I wanted to create an existential hero, and in a sense, I think I accomplished that. But the more I got into the film, the more I began to re-examine my original premise--to show the beauty of the anarchy of the individual versus the decrepit anarchy of society. And then I wondered about the beauty of this individual anarchy and what meaning it really had. I wondered, in fact, if what these guys were up to had any reflection of freedom. And then I found that it didn't. What I feel I shot down--which most people didn't pick up--was the idea that I represented anything that should be glorified or emulated. Well, I didn't, which is why Wyatt finally says to Billy, "We blew it."

[Q] Playboy: What did that line mean?

[A] Fonda: Many things, almost as many as you can come up with. Literally, within the story, we blew it when we went for the easy money, and then thought we could retire. And we thought that was the basis of freedom. Look, there are two parts to the American dream. The first is: Get it all together, no matter who goes down. The no-matter-who-goes-down idea isn't spoken too loudly, sometimes not at all, but it's there. The second part is: And then retire. To me, both of those are untenable positions. I can't, in good conscience, get it all together no matter who goes down, nor can I retire. In a broader sense, we blew it because liberty is just a statue in New York harbor--a polluted harbor. We've blown it because we've spent so much money on so many insane endeavors--germ warfare, ABM, MIRV, Vietnam, Cambodia. We've blown our freedom in the books we don't read and in the universities that don't teach. We've blown it around the world--and not just Americans. Everybody's blown it. We've gotten it together only on an economic level and only in some parts of the world, and not for any other reason. Well, I promise you that when you base your life solely on economics--as Wyatt and Billy did in Easy Rider--you blow your life right out the window.

[Q] Playboy: The two lead characters in Easy Rider may have symbolically blown their lives because of that premise, but they were literally blown apart by Southern shotguns. One of the criticisms of your film is that it unfairly characterizes the South.

[A] Fonda: People accuse us of that, but I say no. The South has very little to do with the movie. The idea is that we're traveling from Los Angeles to Florida to retire. We have to go through the South. But we could have gone through Detroit or Buffalo and been ripped up just as easily by a bunch of geeks up there. So, for me, it's not an indictment of the South at all. People down there were generally friendly. We had only one bit of trouble--in a restaurant where I was swearing over the phone and these guys pulled guns on me because I'd said "fuck" in front of this cat's wife, and I didn't even know she was there. No, I don't think we treated the South any differently than we would have any other part of America.

[Q] Playboy: Ads for Easy Rider stated, "A man went looking for America.... He couldn't find it anywhere." In view of what you just said--and as some film critics have suggested--do you feel the film is basically anti-American?

[A] Fonda: No, man, not at all. I'm chauvinistic about the picture; it's a very American flick. When Hopper and I started out on Easy Rider, I remember us saying things like, "Fuck those Europeans, man, they ain't never gonna see a movie like this. We're gonna have jump cuts going from left to right, right to left, up and down, in and out--they're really gonna wonder what the hell's happening." I thought Easy Rider could be a hit in America, but it's also done very well in Europe, which surprised me. It's shown there with subtitles, but the Europeans pick up on everything that's going down. It played capacity business in places like Stockholm and Helsinki for between six months and a year. Now, what kind of identification do those people have with the U. S.? None. But they have a great deal of identification with what the movie's about--people who are afraid and searching for something to live for. Which is why the film has done so well.

[Q] Playboy: It was a huge hit among the younger generation everywhere. Do you think it's reached older people, too?

[A] Fonda: Sure it has, and for a lot of reasons. A couple of obvious ones: The establishment magazines all said wild things about the film, and it's making so much money that the establishment wants to know about it, because they're heavily into the economic process. What actually happened is that younger people talked so much about it that it brought the older people in. I thought older people would put it down, but they haven't; I've heard people in their 40s comment, "Even though I don't totally understand it, this film is saying something important." That keeps their eyes and ears open; they're listening to what their kids say. I liken it to Rebel Without a Cause, which was such a big success. All the kids went to see Rebel, which without Jimmy Dean wouldn't have been a very interesting movie. But the kids went to see Rebel and went home and said, "That's what's happening in our house." And the parents went to see the film. And this is happening with Easy Rider.

[Q] Playboy: Did you think it would?

[A] Fonda: No, and if it wasn't for Bert Schneider, our executive producer, it wouldn't have happened. First of all, he gave us the money to make the flick and left us alone. Bert protected us all the way, because Columbia was very insecure with the film; they didn't know what it meant. They kept asking us and we'd say, well, look at it; what you think it means is what it means. They weren't ready for that answer. We took it to the Cannes Film Festival and Columbia sent about 41 of their executives, and when they saw everybody at Cannes give us a standing ovation at the end of the film, they thought, "Now, wait a minute. Maybe we got something here." The film opened in New York and started breaking records from the first day. Same thing in Los Angeles, Stockholm, Paris. At that point, Columbia got behind us, and now we're the number-one film they have, the top-grossing non-road-show film in Columbia's history. Easy Rider hasn't yet surpassed some of their films like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, with about $28,000,000, but it will.

[Q] Playboy: How much do you think you'll get to keep for yourself?

[A] Fonda: A lot. At least a couple of million bucks over a couple of years.

[Q] Playboy: How much importance does that money have for you?

[A] Fonda: It's important in this way: I like to sail. I used to ski anyplace there was snow, but I tore my ankle up playing tennis here one day, so I had to give it up. I was so aesthetically into skiing that it was great for me--I could make a turn last for hours. I'd be going down a slope quite fast, and then I'd go into a slow turn and just turn and turn and turn and then hop around and do those turns again. Anyway, because of the ankle, skiing and tennis both went. When I was younger I dug sailing, because it was involved with action, life and survival. Well, I just went sailing again and it was like skiing used to be for me. I've wanted a boat for a long time. I even went down the tubes so far as to make a deal with American International to make three flicks if they bought me a boat and paid me some bread on top; they went for it, bought me the boat and everything. But the first flick they wanted me to do was such shit, I said forget the boat. I could have taken it and sold out to AIP. Instead, I went for Easy Rider and dropped the boat. But I still want it; that's why the money from Easy Rider is important.

[Q] Playboy: How much is the boat going to cost?

[A] Fonda: About $200,000, maybe $250,000. I'm gonna have it built; I want a fiberglass sailboat about 65 feet long. Sailing is a highly expensive sport and I don't intend to be a miser about it. I intend to circumnavigate the globe with my two children and my wife, and on different parts of the journey, take along people who are my close friends. That's expensive, but it's what I want to do; that's part of my life style. It's like making movies, which is expensive, too. Well, I think that the way I live is my art. I'm not saying that everybody should go sailing, but I know that when I do it, all the stress, the problems and the competition leave me. In all of my sea experiences I've related to the natural surroundings that I've been in; I'm basically a naturalist. Rather than taking off to the hills and hiding in a mountain shack and grooving on birds, I want to take my children around the world on a boat. That's my on-the-road number. Not as a hippie or a beatnik or anything like that, either. Now that I've got the bread to do it, I feel like I've got it all, like I'm sitting on top of it. I've already got another production started and I'm working and grooving.

[Q] Playboy: On The Hired Hand?

[A] Fonda: Right. It's a very simple film. People may wonder why I'm doing it, especially after Easy Rider, which seems to be such a contemporary statement of our problems. It's what I call a classical Western, about a cowboy who's on the road, who cut out on his old lady when she was pregnant and for seven years now, he's been riding up and down the West, punching cows here, doing a gig there. He gets tight with an old guy and a young cat and the three of them ride out toward California, where the old guy can be a sheriff and they'll be the deputies, or whatever their dream is. Early in the film, the youngest guy gets killed and I shoot his murderer in the feet as we're getting away, crippling him. The kid's death makes me realize that punching cows is bullshit, and then my character figures he blew his first responsibility and feels he has to go back home. So I go back and make it all over again with my woman, when suddenly a finger belonging to my other partner, the old guy, arrives in the mail--with a note that says, "If you don't come, you get a finger a week." Well, I realize that the cat I crippled has gotten hold of my older partner and is sending me his fingers 'cause I'm the one who shot him up--and he wants my ass. So he's calling me out and here I am: I split from my chick when she was in need once before, as many cats will do--especially when their lady is pregnant. And yet I've had more of a relationship with this guy I've been riding with. What do I do? Well, I go. And I get killed, and the old cat lives.

That's the story. To me, it relates; I talk about people who were on the road and tried to settle down but can't because it's too late. Like, I'm sure all those people in the Tate case wish they could go back, just go back home. One girl who was wanted by the police said, "I've got to go home"; it's the most human thing for a drifter to think. And that's where they caught her. In the same way, my character in the movie gives in to his human emotions and, because of them, gets trapped. He has to make an incredible decision--and, like so many others he's made, it's the wrong decision. But how can we moralize about it. you know? He feels his responsibility is not to stay with his wife but to go and save his friend. To me, that becomes a valid statement about the way things are. It creates questions; it doesn't answer any. I'm writing, directing and acting in it and my company is producing it. I have final cut, full autonomy--no questions, no studio control. I even own the rights to distribution.

[Q] Playboy: Do you intend to take off in your boat as soon as you finish The Hired Hand?

[A] Fonda: I'm not sure, because after The Hired Hand, I plan to make a feature-length documentary about environmental pollution on all its levels--from automobile exhaust to mental exhaust. Whether it takes the form of DDT or racism, it pollutes the environment. It's a big gamble for me, because I'm just going to make the film and not worry about distribution or anything like that until it's completed. If it can't run in motion-picture theaters, then it'll have to be television. I want to reach as many people as I can with this one; I really want to shake people's minds. If it makes money, too, that'll be fine, but the main thing is that I want maybe 50,000,000 people to see it and discuss it, and I want to create an economic interest in ecology within the movie industry. If the film is successful, the studios will say, "My God, here's a guy who made a total information film--and made money on it. Let's make more like it." I intend to come up with an Easy Rider on an information level. I want to show the rise and fall of the earth and I want people to come out of a theater and--just like they did after Easy Rider--say, "Christ, what happened? Did we cause that?" One of the countries we'll be going to on this one is China.

[Q] Playboy: What do you expect to get out of a visit to China?

[A] Fonda: Part of the pollution I'm going to deal with when I get to China is that Chinese-versus-Caucasian bag. There are 800,000,000 Chinese out there who are so freaked out that they think they got enemies all over the world, and they're arming themselves and getting ready for all-out war. The film will show the insanity of it all--and part of the insanity is that we're making the Chinese more uptight instead of cooling the situation. Same thing in Africa. A lot of African nations are starting to get their governments moving, but this country isn't helping them out, because we play off their black-and-white problems politically, in the same way we do with the Arabs and Israelis. We'll also bring it home to the spiritual pollution of racism here in America.

[Q] Playboy: Will the film be simply an indictment or will you be proposing any solutions to these problems?

[A] Fonda: The solutions will be implicit. The movie will suggest that race, for example, will remain a problem as long as we keep thinking in terms of black and white. Our problem transcends black and white. There's no question that black people have been excluded from many parts of American life; their grievances are real and must be redressed. But my personal belief is that armed revolution by black people is not the answer; I totally reject that notion.

[Q] Playboy: For that reason, do you reject militant black groups such as the Black Panthers?

[A] Fonda: Yes, I do. They're reactionaries--they're out there reacting against something, not acting for something. It's too late for black identity--or white identity or green identity. That's all past. The world is too polarized already along those lines. Black people are looking for an image when there's no time left for them to find it--not in black terms. The only identity they can have now is human identity, which has nothing to do with pigmentation. This doesn't mean I don't have compassion for the Panthers, of course, even if I don't agree with them. I know very well that the Man's down on them. There have been ten or fifteen separate raids on Panther headquarters all around the country. Smacks a wee bit of harassment to me when you got 100 cops shooting at six Panthers at five in the morning. But this is a tough area to get into, because I'm a Beverly Hills, uptown white. I suppose my views would seem more valid if I were living in the ghetto.

There's only one way I can relate it to you: I know this cat who plays flute; his name is Charles Lloyd. He's a good flute player, sells a lot of records, well liked. OK, outside of that, he's also a beautiful cat. He's a left-handed Pisces--and I'm a left-handed Pisces. There ain't no difference between me and Charles Lloyd, you know? Lloyd, he knows there ain't no difference; he calls me brother. That's a black term, nowadays, but a long time ago, it was a white term, too. What I'm trying to say is that the black people I know aren't black--and it's not just uptown blacks I'm talking about. They're not black in the same sense that I'm not white to them, in the same sense that neither of us can afford to think of ourselves as Americans anymore. Knowing what I know of the state of the world and its polluted environment, societies and political systems, how can any of us afford to be merely Americans or Russians or Chinese or anything else? We can't. We can only afford to be human beings.

[Q] Playboy: Wouldn't many blacks reply that their worth as human beings will never be recognized until their dignity as blacks has first been asserted?

[A] Fonda: Look, I know many beautiful black cats who are spending their energies solidifying the black community, giving it black identity, black honor. But what they're doing is just a black version of what we're doing--solidifying the white community from a white point of view. As long as there are white people who insist on being white, there are going to be black, yellow and green people who will pick up their banners. And vice versa. This hurts me, man, because those brains aren't black or white or yellow. It can't be us and them anymore; it has to be just us. We don't have time for separatism; and it doesn't work.

Not too long ago, a cat came to me with a problem. Black cat. Called me on the phone and said, "Man, I gotta talk to you." He'd met my sister and Jane gave him my telephone number and told him, "Call my brother. You'd like to talk to him." So he came to me, and he was bitter the whole time he was talking to me, really uptight; and when he finally came down to it, the cat's problem was: He was in love with a white chick. He'd been programed for years to hate those white devils--and he was in love with a white chick. It was causing him such grief that he couldn't eat. And I said, "Wow, you've just stumbled onto it, man, you understand? Why shouldn't you be in love with a white chick?" He says, "How can I tell my braves this? They'd kill me." But there's no reason why he shouldn't be involved with a white chick. Or her with him. If he wants her, that's cool, that's fine, go with it, don't feel hung by it. But here was this cat, totally hung because he was convinced he had to be black in all things, and he's a militant leader, man, militant. Walks around with a loaded gun, has 600 or 700 braves. What's he gonna do? This guy has energies, he's intelligent, really intelligent, and yet he's strung out by being black--and not from Whitey's point of view; he's strung out by being black from the blacks' point of view. But how can he possibly not be in love with a white chick, black chick, green chick or any other chick?

This is one of the things I'm going to try to put across in my film, because it's a big part of mental pollution and it affects me deeply. I've got two hostages to fortune, as Jack Kennedy said--my two children. Not only do they have to grow up surrounded by an atmosphere of hate and misunderstanding, but they also are growing up in an atmosphere so polluted it may poison them to death, which is what the environmental part of my pollution movie will be about. It's all right here, too: Living in Los Angeles is living in ground zero as far as the air is concerned.

[Q] Playboy: Have you or members of your family ever actually been physically affected by air pollution?

[A] Fonda: Sure we have. My little girl gets nauseated when the smog gets bad at school; her school's down on Santa Monica Boulevard, where it's very thick. Out here it's supposed to be clear, but I get sick because of it once in a while. When I go to Maui, where there's no smog or very little of it, in four days I can go to sleep at nine o'clock at night, without even getting stoned, and I wake up refreshed at five in the morning. I wake up and it's a groove. There's the difference. I breathe fresh air.

[Q] Playboy: Many ecologists feel that pollution has advanced to the point where the death of our planet is imminent. Do you agree?

[A] Fonda: I don't know if I'm as pessimistic as that. Society's attitude toward air pollution is changing, but whether or not the changes will come quick enough is something else again. I think that when the truth of the situation hits people, they'll begin to take corrective action. And the truth of the situation is simply this: On a proper fast, we can go weeks without eating, with maybe just a little water here and there. We can also go a long time without exercise. And even a few days without sleeping, although it'll get you crazy. But only a few minutes without air. So why are we schmucking up the air? Seventy percent of the world's oxygen is made by diatoms, microscopic organisms that live in the ocean. The rest of the world's oxygen is made by plants, through their leaves. And that's it, folks. Those are the only two ways we get it together for top-priority air.

Fact: Even if the pollution rates of the James River, the Hudson River and the Delaware River don't rise from their present levels, within 50 years most of the Atlantic Ocean will be uninhabitable by living organisms. And diatoms are living organisms. So are our forests; we just don't have great forests like we used to have. So what are we going to breathe? With the population rising, people are wondering what we're going to eat and where we're going to live. But I've talked to a couple of the technocrats, and we'll eat; we might not like the taste of what we eat, but we'll eat. And we may have to live 20 stories down in the ground, but we'll live. But what are we going to breathe? You can't make it on carbon monoxide--only on oxygen. Second problem: People don't give a damn about water pollution. Well, sooner or later, the people who bottle pure, unchlorinated water are going to run out and the demand is going to go way up. What are we going to drink then? In 15 years there won't be any fresh-water lake or stream that won't be polluted.

[Q] Playboy: How do you think the public can be mobilized to begin demanding solutions to these problems?

[A] Fonda: Television works very well--for three-year-olds. But how do we get adults to listen? We have to couch it to them so they learn themselves, so that we don't have to tell them anything. They're going to have to experience a direct perception of what it is we're doing to ourselves. When they have a direct perception, it'll become something they believe in and identify with. Somebody may tell you, with great emotion, that we're crapping up our world, but you will only understand that intellectually. To perceive it, however, and make it change your life and let it operate in your life, direct perception is needed.

[Q] Playboy: What course of action would you suggest for non-moviemakers who feel as strongly as you do about pollution?

[A] Fonda: I'd advise them to do the same thing that I'm doing--try to convince people that by poisoning our air and our water, we're poisoning ourselves. And not to sit back and let somebody else do the talking. I spend a great deal of energy doing just that, even if it's only on a person-to-person level, but I spend it--sometimes talking to 20,000,000 people at a shot on one television show, sometimes to just a tiny fraction of that on a little radio talk show in the middle of the night. I even spend time talking with my father about it, because he can influence a lot of people who might automatically tune me out.

[Q] Playboy: Is your father receptive to your social and political convictions?

[A] Fonda: As time goes by, I find that he is, more and more. It's a great thing for me, because I had a lot of trouble with my father while I was growing up.

[Q] Playboy: What was the problem?

[A] Fonda: Everybody has a problem with their parents, and I had a very typical problem, the "nobody understands me" kind of routine. I dramatized it more because I was in a more dramatic setup. I enjoyed having been born with a platinum spoon up my ass, but I remember being very down on my father for not speaking to me. He was a busy man and I was a hypersensitive kid who needed somebody to talk to, so I reacted quite bitterly to him. I guess the first big shock my sister Jane and I experienced about my father was discovering that Henry Fonda wasn't perfect. It really disoriented us.

[Q] Playboy: All children discover that their parents aren't perfect. Why should that have been so traumatic for you?

[A] Fonda: Because my father was presented as perfect; the man who played Abe Lincoln and Mr. Roberts and Tom Joad, the man who carried everybody's honesty and integrity on his shoulders, turned out to be a hollow man to us. Now, I didn't wake up one morning and say, "My God, the old man has been lying to me," because he never lied to me, really. He just didn't say anything. To me that was very important. I needed to have things said to me. But I think he felt I was a failure. And that feeling of rejection, added to problems like my mother's death, helped me toward some pretty self-destructive acts.

[Q] Playboy: Such as?

[A] Fonda: Attempting to commit suicide, for one thing. When I was ten, I shot myself in the stomach with a .22-caliber pistol. I was in a hospital for four weeks under intensive care.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you do it?

[A] Fonda: I blanked that completely. I can remember everything else about it, though. I was visiting the R. H. Kress estate in Upstate New York. I'm not sure if I was really trying to kill myself or not, but I do recall that after I shot myself, I didn't want to die--and I came very close to dying. Jane tells me that the doctor came out of the operating room and said I was dead, that my heart had stopped beating. My sister is prone to dramatize, as I am. He may have said things were looking tense; but regardless of what the doctor said, that's how she took it. She thought it was all over for me. Anyway, I was conscious after I shot myself; I was also very scared, and I got the chauffeur to drive me to a hospital in Ossining. It took the doctors a while to understand it was a gunshot wound; there wasn't a lot of blood. They rolled me over to see if they could find anything in the back, and the guy saw a little lump and said, "I think that's a bullet." Then he felt it and it was a bullet. But they didn't know what to do. They were giving me shots for gangrene and shock and pain and I was beginning to get a little dopey, but I remember that they didn't know what to do. There was just one doctor around who knew how to operate on bullet wounds and they finally got him on the phone. I remember looking down at the floor and seeing all these legs walking by all the time, different legs belonging to nurses and doctors, and then suddenly there was a set of legs with mud-covered hunting boots on. That was the man. He had just come back from duckhunting, a Dr. Sweet. He had been the Sing Sing prison doctor for years, and Ossining hospital at that time was right next to Sing Sing. Anyway, the cat saved my life. I guess my father's distance from me had something to do with that incident, but now I know that the life of an actor is a very strange thing and I can see how it interferes with raising children. But my father's nature is, or was, incommunicative. Today we communicate.

[Q] Playboy: What changed that?

[A] Fonda: He got older and I got wiser, or I got older and he got wiser. I'm not sure which happened; but it's still not a hunky-dory relationship. I don't see him enough--only when he's here in Los Angeles, every week or so. And I talk to him on the phone a lot.

[Q] Playboy: That sounds like a good deal of contact.

[A] Fonda: I don't know what enough is. I'd like to sit down and be straight with him. That's a two-way street, of course. I can sit down and be straight with him and if he doesn't return it, that blocks it for me. I have a feeling he thinks that in order to tell me the truth, he'd have to confess the past, which would be terribly difficult for him. We've made so much noise--Jane and I--about his past and our past that he probably feels we would demand he confess all his sins of omission. That isn't the case. All we'd have to do is start right at that moment being straight with each other. I'm radically different from Dad in many ways, and that hasn't always gone down easily with him.

[Q] Playboy: Does he disapprove of the way you live?

[A] Fonda: He did. I smoke grass. I smoke a lotta grass. I smoke grass every day, or at least every night. He was quite opposed to the fact that I smoked grass for a long time. Until finally, I said, "OK, I can understand your being opposed to it, but don't call me guilty. There are laws against oral copulation and you choose to break those laws without feeling guilty. Well, I choose to break the law against the consumption of marijuana without feeling guilty."

[Q] Playboy: Did you ever try to turn him on?

[A] Fonda: I passed some joints to him, but whether he turned on or not I don't know. I heard that he did, but he never told me. Another big disagreement we had was over Vietnam. He went over there at the Government's expense and when he came back, I went to see him. I told him that if he had gone over there on his own, as a private citizen, if he had paid for his own ticket, I would have felt differently. But by going over there on the Government's ticket, he was supporting something that is insupportable. All he could say was something about "those peaceniks." Well, my hair was down to my shoulders and I told him, "That's me, Daddy. I'm the peacenik. You've got to talk to me." He told me I didn't know what's going on over there and if I did, I wouldn't say things that only demoralize our troops. And I told him that if we were to have a televised debate about the war and I was going to debate the political reasons why we should be there, I could find better reasons; I could be more convincing than he could, and he'd been there. "Politically, I can prove better than you can why we should be in Vietnam," I said, "but there's one thing I can't do: I can't find one realistic, logical, humanistic reason why we should be there. And I'm dealing in a realistic, logical, humanistic world these days, Dad. I'm not dealing in a political world. If you deal in a political world, you must take the political consequences. But I refuse your consequences. If one Vietnamese baby gets bombed to death in her back yard, I feel as if my own two children have been killed, because they're innocents, too." And those were the days before everybody knew about things like the My Lai massacre and soldiers shooting kids. "Oh, that's idealistic," he said. And I said, "You might feel it's idealistic, but I find it quite logical to understand that the world is capable of destroying my children for purely political reasons. There's no way I can rationalize that. There's no way a government can convince me to salute a flag, to pledge allegiance. No way." And I walked out on him. We didn't talk too much about it after that. Then, one night in New York, when I was doing some stupid television show to make some money, I got a call from him. He said, "Well, I'm on my way to Houston," as if it had some great meaning. I had no idea what he meant. "I'm going down there to help support Gene McCarthy. I don't know what good it will do, but it's the only thing I guess I can do." Well, I wasn't out supporting Gene, because I wasn't interested in supporting any of the schmucks, and McCarthy wasn't going anywhere near where I had to go.

[Q] Playboy: But, in supporting McCarthy, your father had completely reversed his views about the war. Weren't you expecting too much of him?

[A] Fonda: Probably so--but he started it, because he's a perfectionist, and I get that from him. When he works in the theater, that's his trademark--being a perfectionist. He is a very hard worker and rarely relaxes. Jane and I got that drive right away; he passed it on to us. Another thing he passed on: I know he wanted me to be something other than what I was, and also that he didn't know what it was he wanted me to be. And he was unaware, in his own stoic American way, of a lot of the things that Jane and I were going through. An example: A women's magazine did a story about Jane in which they interviewed her and me and Dad and some other people. When they interviewed Dad, he was talking about himself and he said, "You know, I'm a terribly shy person, really. I'm an introvert. I'm so afraid of boring people." The woman who was interviewing him said, "Oh, really? Jane just said that about herself." And he reacted strongly. He said, "Jane, she feels that way?" He was unaware that Jane also felt that terrible fear of boring people at parties, meetings, all over. I have the same feeling. Using the fact that we share that same fear seems like a weird thing to put down, but there it is. He had so little knowledge of Jane and me and what our own life was and what we felt.

[Q] Playboy: Have you and your sister always been very close?

[A] Fonda: No; until recently we were quite far apart. We traded information, but we had very little communication. That was due mostly to the fact that we were miles apart as far as geographies were concerned. When we were kids, we did a lot together, until we moved East to Greenwich, Connecticut. I was seven, she was nine. We went to different schools then and we began to get different friends and separated. Plus the strain of what was happening within the family. My father was about to divorce my mother, who was very sick, and we were moving from one house to another house to another house in the same town. And Greenwich is one of the most prejudiced towns in the world. I remember one time we were going to meet David O. Selznick, who was coming to pick us up to go sailing on the biggest yacht that ever hit Greenwich. Selznick had the biggest of everything, and this was the biggest thing in Long Island Sound. Well, there was David O. with his full crew and everything, approaching Greenwich Harbor to pick us up, and Margaret Sullavan and Jennifer Jones, among others. This fucking boat was as big as the Empire State Building and there was plenty of room for it in Greenwich Harbor, but they wouldn't let him dock because he was Jewish. That's a minor example of the many insipid and deceitful things that happened to us in Greenwich.

[Q] Playboy: How many years were you there?

[A] Fonda: Three years. My mother died, I shot myself in the stomach, my father remarried and we got out of there. Our family life completely disintegrated after that.

[Q] Playboy: When did you re-establish contact with your sister?

[A] Fonda: Well, we always were able to talk to each other, but we didn't get close again until the last few years--I guess when she met Roger Vadim.

[Q] Playboy: How do you get along with him?

[A] Fonda: Fine, I like him fine. Needless to say, I don't know him as well as Jane does, but I've met him many times. I knew Vadim when he and Jane lived together for three years before they got married. He's a very gentle person and was good for her.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think Jane's recent and deepening involvement in social causes is in any way due to your influence?

[A] Fonda: Partly. I guess; we've talked a lot in the last couple of years about the state of this country and what we can do to change it. But Jane has gone through her own set of changes; she was just as lonely and insecure as I was when we were growing up. But I think she's very together now as a person and very sure of herself. We're getting tight, very tight, and I like that. I'm only tight like that with my sister and my father. But I have cousins and aunts and uncles who are very kind and good to me whom I don't see enough. My father's sister and brother-in-law especially were very important in my life. They really helped me.

[Q] Playboy: How?

[A] Fonda: Well, I went to high school at Westminster in Simsbury, Connecticut, but I quit before the end of my junior year. It was more the fault of my psyche than the school. I couldn't make it under the circumstances of living in that community, and of my family disintegrating. I started developing great neuroses. This I understand now, but then it was just what's this, what's that, what am I doing, my God, I gotta get out of here. And I split, went to live with my uncle Jack and aunt Harriet in Omaha, Nebraska. They felt that it was necessary that I complete my high school education and perhaps go to college. I didn't want any part of it, but they convinced me that I should at least see where I stood. So I went out to the University of Omaha and took a series of achievement exams, I. Q., personality-evaluation and various psychological tests. The man who ran the testing. Dr. William Thompson, a psychologist, was also the dean of liberal arts and he became very friendly with me. After he saw the results of my tests, he suggested that I shouldn't go back to high school--I should go to college. Which was great for my ego, because I'd been told I'd been a fucking failure all my life, and here was a guy who said, "Well, actually, you should be a sophomore in college. But we have a problem: You haven't graduated from high school." So I did. I got my certificate of graduation from a girls' boarding school called Brownell Hall in Omaha, which I attended for a few months. It was really neat. Then I went right into the University of Omaha under the guidance of Dr. Thompson. He was a great help to me during the three years I went to college.

[Q] Playboy: Did you like it there?

[A] Fonda: No. I enjoyed a lot of the people I met and some of the experiences I had; but as far as the educational system, no. I didn't have it in for the University of Omaha, just for the American method of education. Plus the fact that there's very little incentive for teachers: The pay is shit. They don't usually get involved past the level of conditioned response; students are conditioned to respond with the right answers, pass the exams and that's the end of it--which has nothing to do with the educational process. Very little actual learning goes on in college. I think classes should be discussion groups, where the teacher winds up learning as much as the students and where both are more concerned with questions than with answers. I think answers are irrelevant. People might call that anarchistic, but I saw hundreds of students at the peak of their learning lives wasting their time by looking for answers in the back of their books--where the answers are, answers that already have been answered. I think answers are inherent in a question, so that if you understand a question, you begin to know the answer yourself. Anyway, by that time I was becoming involved in acting.

[Q] Playboy: Did you find that being Henry Fonda's son was a help or a hindrance?

[A] Fonda: Inside the business, I found, when I started, a general interest in me as Henry Fonda's son, because it meant a commodity that producers might be able to sell. But the big word "might" was always in there; they might be able to sell me. As for investing a great deal of money in me, they weren't up to that. But they were up to seeing if I could read the lines. Beyond that, I had to carry it myself. In other words, I was able to get the ear of a producer, having probably already met him sometime in my life. After that the trouble would start, sometimes from fellow actors who felt that I was given breaks. That didn't happen the first time I acted--at the Omaha Community Playhouse--but it did when I got to Broadway in Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole. A lot of people felt I was given the part because I was Henry Fonda's son. Well, the first time I read for the play was in October of 1960. I was turned down because they were looking for Bobby Morse. I'm tall and skinny; I'm a whole different kind of personal gig than Bobby Morse. But he was the hot item then and they figured that's how they wanted to go with the part. So I didn't hear from the producers for more than six months.

By that time, I had already left college and was in summer stock, where I was freaking out; I went around punching walls until my knuckles were bloody--but walls rather than people. I still felt like a failure; I was really feeling weird, so I called my uncle in Omaha and he wired me $150 to come home, so I could spend some time with Dr. Thompson, who acted as more of a friend than a shrink. It was during this time that my agent called me to say that the producers of the play wanted me to read for the part a second time and that they were willing to fly me from Omaha to New York. That was fine with me, because I knew this chick, Susan Brewer, who was going to Sarah Lawrence, and I wanted to see her, 'cause I thought I wanted to marry her. I did marry her, and it was probably the smartest thing I've done in my life. I don't think we needed a wedding, because I don't think of Susan as my wife; a wife gives you trouble and bitches at you. Susan is my old lady; your old lady is the person who loves the hell out of you, who takes care of you. I don't know if you can separate loving someone from liking someone, but I really like Susan; she's my best friend. Anyway, I married her within a week after the play opened on Broadway. I was 21, I had my chick, I had my part and I didn't need Thompson anymore.

[Q] Playboy: Were you using drugs at that stage of your life?

[A] Fonda: No, I wasn't into smoking at all. The only thing I knew about the stuff came out of jokes my first stepmother used to tell about dopeheads who were always walking around saying things like, "Yeah, man, cool," and, "Right, baby." Now, of course, I know what she was talking about. But I was in no way into dope until I was 22, when I first smoked grass.

[Q] Playboy: What was your reaction?

[A] Fonda: Well, it sure got me stoned. First time I ever smoked grass was in the Carlton Tower Hotel in London. I knew nothing about it, really. The guy who gave it to me, Jim Mitchum, asked me if I'd ever smoked pot before. Oh, yeah, I said. Then he told me I had to clean it. Clean it? I told him I'd never had to clean it before. Well, Mitchum said to crunch it up between my hands and take the seeds out. So I went up to the hotel room and I told Susan we were going to smoke grass--no, it was pot then. I was sitting at a desk and I had all this grass laid out there and I had a pair of tweezers and I was taking a seed out here, a twig out there--that's how I was cleaning it. Anyway, I stuffed it into a little pipe, knowing nothing about rolling, and then said, "OK, here we go." I told my old lady that I'd smoked it quite a few times and that it wasn't habit-forming. But I was just a little bit afraid; the first time I'd heard about people smoking grass, it was in the context of dope addicts and weirdos who blow their minds. All the while, you understand, I was pouring down gallons of vodka. I'd started on wine, gone to Scotch and then to vodka, because all I wanted to do was to get drunk.

Anyway, my wife was very skeptical, but she believes in me, so I passed her the pipe. Now my in-laws are gonna know that I turned their daughter on: She took a hit and then she coughed and told me that she couldn't hold the smoke in, that it hurt her throat. "No, it can't hurt your throat," I told her. I must have taken close to 30 hits trying to show my old lady how to smoke grass. The great teacher. Well, she just coughed and coughed and coughed, and she didn't get high. But I got very high. Giggled and laughed, jumped under the covers and got cold. When I looked at her, she would say to me, "Oh, honestly, Peter." And I'd say, "You're talking behind yourself," because it sounded like her voice was coming from some century or universe behind her, even though I knew she was right there; it was a great hallucination and I was digging it. And then I got very hungry. That's what really got to me the most, because I have no appetite. I got very hungry and I ordered up all this shit from that great hotel; and then I got very paranoid, which is the second thing I learned about grass. I started worrying that the waiter was going to smell it, that he'd know what had been happening. But the guy came in, laid the food down and split. There was no problem at all. I ate everything and had a ball.

I turned on a few times again; this was late '62. Turned on again in '64, so it was like a two-year span after the first time I got stoned. Meanwhile, I went right back to drinking, which was my habit Like, I would come home and say, "I gotta have a drink." I never come home and say I gotta have a joint. Sometimes I'll think, Oh, man, I'd love to get stoned, but that's a different number. Anyway, like I said, for the next two years I fell back into my habit of drinking, and then one day I got pleasantly stoned. I relaxed, I felt good; there was some paranoia, but I could deal with it. And it was great for me, because at the time I was still very uptight, trying to be the perfect image of young America, the ultimate David Eisenhower--and it wasn't working. I carried a gun and I probably wanted to kill somebody--myself, I guess. I knew I needed something, but I didn't have the patience for the type of meditation that was preached in those days and I didn't--and don't--buy the shrinks. So I began to smoke regularly, every day. And I started calming down.

[Q] Playboy: Critics of marijuana usage would point out that you were using the drug to escape from reality--and that you weren't really calming down but only copping out.

[A] Fonda: That escape is a cop-out, not facing up to it--right. But I felt that if I could escape such insidious things as fear and doubt, hate and anger--emotions I was constantly feeling in those days--then I was right in what I was doing. The way we now live, "facing up to it" means a confrontation. Confrontation keeps this neurotic life we lead going--feeds it. So perhaps escape is an acceptable antidote within this kind of social system. Listen, if you're out in the middle of some great place, like Yosemite, and you gotta get stoned every moment, then you've gone too far, you're like an alcoholic, and that's no good. I don't say you can't be in Yosemite and be digging it and want to get stoned. But the difference is if you have to get stoned all the time. I've also found that when my mind is quiet, I assimilate things, I learn. Sometimes grass will quiet your mind down a bit; that doesn't mean grass is necessarily the way to do it, but I'm just saying it's an example of a way to get past some of the daily abrasion of living that can hang you up.

[Q] Playboy: What would happen to you if you could never get any more marijuana? Would you revert to drinking?

[A] Fonda: No. No way. I couldn't go back, but not because of the joints. I dropped some acid, which opened my mind to the possibilities of so many different ways of looking at things and also opened my mind totally to relating to life.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think you could have arrived at these perceptions without LSD?

[A] Fonda: Maybe, but I still would have had to expose myself to the possibility of other existences for myself. Before my first trip, I believed in American institutions. Like I said, I was a conservative, a registered Republican: short hair, suits, act in whatever shit the agency told me to, pick up the money, fur coat for my old lady, house in Beverly Hills, tennis courts. I wasn't Hollywood all the way, because that kind of finger-poppin' slicky wasn't my style; I was basically an Eastern cat who was just tolerating it. But I thought of myself as upright, American and straight. I was into acting out other people's ideals, doing the right thing, joining the right party, meeting the right people. Being a socialite, the bluebook thing, I believed in it. I accepted it.

[Q] Playboy: Totally?

[A] Fonda: Oh, yeah. The right clothes from the right shops, the right clubs to belong to. I would have been the perfect number if I'd eventually grown to be an attractive, groovy-looking guy rather than a skinny, aesthetic kid. I had an HK500 Facel Vega, Jaguar XK-E, Mercedes 300SL Gullwing, Buick Riviera, two motorcycles and a superduper station wagon with a big V8 and a shift and wide wheels that really held it to the road--all right here in River City and all at the same time. I came back after my first acid trip and I looked at that shit and I thought: Man, I can't even decide what the fuck to drive today. The whole pile was gone in two weeks. Now, I still love machinery; I jump into Vadim's Ferrari or Polanski's Ferrari and I groove. I love it; it's a great car; it's one of the best cars I've ever driven. But I drive a Volkswagen convertible; love the fuckin' thing. Cops don't see me in a Volkswagen, and I don't want to get stopped. It's a simple life; I live in this house, which is no great mansion. The tennis court is full of tricycles and electric cars and swings and old pussycats. Fuckin' around, that's my life today. Before acid, I was thinking about flying around in 320 Cessnas, traveling the world over like I was James Bond. Always trying to create an elegant, conservative, graceful fashion thing. Trying to emulate my father, whom I saw as an elegant, graceful, conservative man. That all went after I took LSD.

[Q] Playboy: When did that first LSD trip take place--and what was it like?

[A] Fonda: In September of 1965--I was 25--and it was pretty freaky. A friend of mine--he wasn't a doctor or anything like that--knew that my head was really fucked up, really self-destructive, and figured I should take an acid trip. Looking back now, I know he was right, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to other people; that's a move they have to consider for themselves. I'll just tell you what happened. The first part of the trip was a real downer; we didn't have the word "bummer" in those days. But I was used to downers. I felt very alone and my body ached a lot, almost as if I had a fever. There were some oatmeal cookies to eat and they looked as if they were worm-infested; I guess because the texture of an oatmeal cookie is bumpy and irregular. Under LSD, of course, the cookies immediately began to move: Worms were crawling in and out of them, but I didn't figure anything was really wrong with them even though they were alive. Then I ate a plum and it was alive, too, and it tasted fantastic. After that, I didn't want to eat anything more, so I wandered around a bit and did a lot of interior contemplation. I remember at one point I crawled onto a shelf in the linen closet; although I'm six two, I'm rather skinny and able to kinda compress myself. Anyway, there I was on the shelf, and I was scared. I was thinking of my mother and I was thinking of her womb, and I didn't want to be in there. And then I saw my little daughter, Bridget, who just popped out of my stomach and looked at me. When I got out of the closet, I stopped being scared. As the trip progressed, I thought more about my father and about my relationship with him and my mother and my sister. And suddenly I busted through that whole thing and I related to everything. There was no more worry about my father, mother and sister. I began to feel really on top of it. I had no further relationship with the past; I'd kicked it. I walked out of the house where I'd dropped the acid--and the road was erupting and trees were falling, but that didn't bother me, and I walked back here to my house. I looked at it and realized I'd never really seen it before.

[Q] Playboy: In what way?

[A] Fonda: I didn't understand until that moment that I had cut down four magnificent sycamore trees because they were dropping leaves on the cars. I had chopped down these trees, beautiful living things, and suddenly I saw the devastation that I had done to my life. I was looking at what the image of me had done and what the real me was feeling and I understood that up until then, my life had been based on a lot of bullshit.

[Q] Playboy: What was your reaction?

[A] Fonda: I knew I had to make a lot of changes in my life. And the truth of where my head had been was brought home every time I took LSD after that. My worst acid trip, in fact, was about nothing else: I fell asleep, which is terribly frightening on LSD, because there's no way to guard yourself--to hold onto any type of viewpoint or constructive idea or label. I had to go with it, totally. My head was flying and I saw myself as the worst piece of commercial shit in the world. I saw myself as a strange little man named Henry something or other, but it wasn't Henry Fonda and I don't think it was related to my father. Then I changed from this person into a Claes Oldenburg hamburger; the bun was made of Styrofoam and the hamburger was made of foam rubber and the lettuce was plastic. And then I saw myself as a bologna container. Have you ever bought bologna in a supermarket--you know, sliced bologna? The container has a plastic bottom and there's covering over the bologna that you can peel off. Well, I felt that I was an empty bologna container that had been thrown away--plastic garbage. That was the eventual outcome of the ego existence that I was involved in: I was a packaged product.

[Q] Playboy: Your transformation into plastic garbage seems rather tame compared with many tales of bad LSD trips.

[A] Fonda: Well, I don't have those types of demons in my body. The type of fears that I've had to deal with are on a totally different level: mother-father fears, my own potency--not through my cock and balls, but as a living, breathing, functioning organism. My fear was that I was a failure and that I was worth nothing. That's what I had been trained to accept: that I was totally mistaken all the time, that I knew nothing and that I would amount to nothing; that I was a physical failure because I wasn't the big strong halfback type. That was my dragon--failure.

[Q] Playboy: In what way has LSD helped you to slay that dragon?

[A] Fonda: First of all, I've never taken a trip to get high, although acid produces an incredibly weird and wild high. But if I just want to get high, I can smoke grass or drink some wine; I even get high sailing a boat, man. The point of all the trips I've taken--about 25, including lighter, smoother hallucinogens like mescaline and psilocybin--has been to suffer ego loss. To me, the hallucinogenic experience is a concentrated sensitivity encounter between your image and your real self--in which you devastate your image. For many people that can be quite terrifying, because all they have, all they understand and all they're able to relate to is the image they have of themselves--and that image is what relates to everything around them. So if they do away with that image, they become terribly vulnerable and terribly paranoid.

Take a guy in Kenilworth, Illinois, with his three-car garage and his house on the right street, and rip him out of that; put him in Darwin's world, Thoreau's world, a natural world--not just as a lark, but really drop him into it, which is what these hallucinogens do to you--and suddenly he finds himself relating to it, and it's a mind-blowing experience. Under LSD, when you perceive a new set of relations, you either go with it or freak right out. Most people freak right out. Like, Pavlov's dog responds to a bell. It would get freaked out if it had to respond to a whistle, unless you condition it to respond to the whistle. Well, we condition ourselves to respond to dwellings and we place our dwellings where people can see how we live, what we drive, what we wear. Do away with those things and it freaks people right out. The thing I've found that freaks people out most, whether it's LSD or marijuana, is losing control. And the one thing you most have to lose is control.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Fonda: Because the control that we practice has nothing to do with awareness. It's a reactionary point of view, holding onto what we've got. The ego comes on hard and strong and fast and fortifies itself very well. We don't just present a false image to other people; we lie to ourselves as well. We do so consistently, to keep an ego image of ourselves alive. We lie that the grossly inequitable distribution of income in our country isn't bullshit, that the welfare system in this country isn't so bureaucratic and so fucked up that the people who need help don't get it. I'm not copping a New Left slogan; this is the truth, this is the way it is. All this stuff happens, but we lie about it; it's not really happening. The war in Vietnam can't be happening, because we've just cut to a commercial to sell Ajax. The sight of our planes napalming a Vietnamese village doesn't fit our image of ourselves as a nation, so we refuse to believe that it's real, to think about what it really means. We say to ourselves: See how great we are; look at our Tower of Babel, look at our pyramids, look at our Bill of Rights. What Bill of Rights? Look at our Revolution, say the Russians; I'm looking. Look what we're doing here, say the Israelis; I'm looking. Look at our federation, says a new African nation; I'm looking. It's all bullshit. Take that away from them, take away their control, and you're taking away what they relate to--not what they can relate to but what they've decided is relatable to their lives. If we're going to survive as a species, though, we've got to lose that control, let go of those false self-images--one way or another.

[Q] Playboy: Are you prescribing LSD as a global panacea?

[A] Fonda: Hell, no. But we've got to get rid of our phony conditioning somehow, individually as well as nationally, or there's no hope for us. I'm not saying that LSD is a cure-all, or that everyone should try it, or that it can't be dangerous if the wrong people use it. I get very worried when people say they're curious about it, because I know of guys who have walked through glass doors because they didn't think they were glass. I heard of one case where a cat jumped in front of a train. He thought nothing could hurt him, and the fucking train wiped him right out. I know another guy who jumped off a cliff, broke both of his legs and his arms, got up and walked three miles into an Indian village in Mexico. He was totally ripped out of his head, figuring nothing was wrong with him. But I also know of many beautiful changes that take place under LSD--or grass, f remember seeing a film that the Army made, showing soldiers who were under the influence of pot. They looked at their guns, put them down, looked at the sergeants and started laughing. Well, the reason the Government, all governments, oppose even pot is that our system refuses to condone or even tolerate something that makes us question the authority of the system.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think that system will change?

[A] Fonda: It's changing now; that's why we're in such a great upheaval right now. Half of the people rely on security as their basis of life and can't afford to let the system change. A quarter of the population reacts against that half and says, "Fuck you, man. We're gonna change your ass." And the other quarter says, "Hot diggity, man, look at this change we're into." There's a big difference between changing and trying to force change on other people. The first two factions, the one that says "Change, you motherfucker" and the guy that says "Stay where you are and put your hands up," are reactionary. They're both reacting out of fear of each other and of situations they're in. But the last quarter is out there saying, "My God, the whole universe changes drastically every day--not just the weather but things we can't even see. We're changing, for Christ's sake--every day of our lives. What a gas to be part of that." Rather than relating to the static, unimportant things we've gathered around us, we've all got to learn to relate to the changing world. Relate to the trees, the birds, the plants, our children, ourselves. LSD is a teacher, mescaline is a teacher. They teach you because they stimulate you to the idea that there are many ways of looking at things, that life exists in many forms, whether it's you, a glass, a table, a chair or the air around you. If you observe the atomic structure and you look at an atom, with its protons, neutrons and electrons, and then look at the solar system, what's the difference? If that's true, if the atomic structure is such a common denominator, then you and I are just like the planets in the universe. Like us, they're moving and changing and they die and are born again. Within the order of this universe, there's incredible disorder, but that's part of the system, and that system is greater than anything we've come up with here on earth.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think those who believe as you do will be able to bring about basic changes in American life?

[A] Fonda: They can't help but affect the rest of the people; they already have. Psychedelics--an inadequate word for that wipe-out, that color exchange, that cosmic awareness, whatever label you want to give it--have affected our advertising, our music, our art. Music and art are becoming our basis for communication--they've begun to supersede the printed word, à la McLuhan. We demonstrate with our life styles. At the moment, in the midst of this change we're in, the demonstration is reactionary: Kids drop out into communes and that's their life style. But I don't think communes are an alternative. I think they're great places to go for a while, like summer camp. But you can't function in a commune like it's a camp. At this point in time, a real commune is something we're incapable of keeping together--not only the people inside the commune but the people outside. They can't tolerate it.

[Q] Playboy: Is there a viable alternative to current American society, then?

[A] Fonda: I'm not in favor of a counterculture, because I don't think we really need one. What we need is to relate differently to what we already have. What you must do is take your own life. I don't mean shoot yourself in the head; I mean grab it. It's yours. Don't hand your life to a book, a dictionary, a church, a boss, a father or a mother. Don't hand it out. But that doesn't mean reject it; you shouldn't just walk away and live in a little tent in the hills.

[Q] Playboy: What about those who genuinely like what they're doing and how they're living within the present system?

[A] Fonda: If a man likes being a stockbroker or a real-estate agent, if that's his gig, then that's his art. But if all you think about is making money, then not only won't you eventually care, to a degree, how you make your money, but you won't care about any other part of your life except making money. And if making money is your art, then you're fucked. I don't agree, on the other hand, with people who think money is some kind of evil to avoid at all costs. When you're going around the board in Monopoly, pick up the $200 when you pass Go; if you don't, you're just a fool, because you're in the game. Pick up the 200, but don't cut your wrists if all you own is Mediterranean and Baltic avenues and you never get a chance to erect a hotel. Just take it as a game.

[Q] Playboy: Suppose you don't want to play the game.

[A] Fonda: No choice: Just being born puts you into it. Economics plays a part in our lives. We've got to buy our food; we just can't go out and shoot it or grow it all ourselves. That doesn't mean you ignore the natural life, winch may be so good that you never need medical attention--but what happens if, while you're out there grooving on your farm, growing natural organic foods and feeling healthy, your old lady suddenly gets appendicitis or your children need a doctor or a dentist or you maim a hand and need to get it fixed? So you need the money. But as long as the need for money exists for you only in a game structure, you'll always be able to handle it and it'll never become a burden. Once again, however, here I am in Beverly Hills, and it's probably easy for me to say that. But I've had this discussion with cats who feel this way and ain't got nothing, and you can find them over at somebody's house, painting some furniture, putting up some wallpaper, laying some bricks--they're making their money. It doesn't have to be like Midnight Cowboy; hustling your ass on the street, man, is neurotic. Being a slave to making money will finish you. Look at a far-out character like Howard Hughes. You want his life?

[Q] Playboy: Do you know enough about Hughes to talk about his life?

[A] Fonda: Yes, I do. My father-in-law was his right-hand man from the time he began until 1958, when he quit him. He said, "I can't take it anymore, man. I can't take your four-o'clock-in-the-morning phone calls and I can't take your sticking me in a hotel in New York for three weeks to wait for a call from you. That's bullshit." And he left him. Hughes is interesting, but I don't want to be Hughes. He's done some far-out, groovy numbers, but he holds himself up: armed guard, marries a great chick and stuffs her in a barn someplace and gives her all the booze she can drink. That's living? No, as far as money, I have to take it as a game. I take it the way I take the difference between Frisbee and tennis. I used to go out on that tennis court trying to beat that other motherfucker; had to beat his ass. I was so competitive that I tore up my right ankle; it'll never be as good as it was, all because I was an asshole, because I sprained it trying to win that game. Frisbee, well, I throw that Frisbee out there and even if it sails way away from the guy I throw it to, what that Frisbee looks like when it goes sailing through the air is beautiful. I'm involved in a sport, I'm out grooving around on the beach, I'm running much more than in a tennis game, with no mental concentration or competition--just grooving. The same should be true of whatever work you do: Enjoy it, don't get hung up by (continued on page 278)Playboy Interview(continued from page 106) it; don't feel that you've got to go out and beat everybody else.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think competition is basically unhealthy?

[A] Fonda: Not in itself. I just don't believe in competition overriding activity, so that competition is why you're there--to beat the other guy. Then it's not a game; you're not having fun. I think Joe Namath is a perfect example of somebody who involves himself in competition on a beautiful level. You look at Namath, man, that cat doesn't belong to any team; it's him, you know what I mean? Joe Namath, the model Veruschka, those people are singular, they're alone, they're themselves. Their whole life style is them. Elvis Presley is another example. Elvis is so straight it's unbelievable. He doesn't swear or drink or smoke or anything like that. He could be President. We could run him right now and he could beat anyone in California for the Senate, and I truly believe it. The competition these people have is with themselves; they're not out trying to fuck somebody else up. And I relate to this on the level of acting, producing, writing and directing. Should I be involved on a competitive level? There's no way, man. Making Easy Rider, we weren't out to beat anybody else. We weren't out to make a better movie than so-and-so. But we were out to make a good movie, a movie that would reflect some of the changes that young people would like to see in America. I don't mean tear down the Constitution and the Government. I've read the Bill of Rights, I've read the Constitution and I've read the Declaration of Independence. No way I'm gonna tear them down. I want to implement them.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel that our politicians aren't implementing them?

[A] Fonda: Yeah. I've seen a lot of countries and I've met a lot of politicians, and politicians are fucked up everywhere, and they fuck us up because we allow them to. I've never seen a country that premises itself as strongly as we do on the rights of the people, but as I look at this country, I can see that the rights of the people are terribly disoriented and disorganized. In fact, our nation no longer even relates to the Declaration of Independence. All the criticism that's directed toward youth is completely contrary to what this country supposedly is all about. The Declaration of Independence states that when things are going wrong--when life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are kept from you--you must change your Government, throw off the shackles by whatever means are necessary. It's not only your right but your duty. History has shown us that prudence is necessary, that governments must not be changed just for minor reasons. But when insane legislative actions continue to go down--actions denying people life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness--then you must rebel. But for us that doesn't mean an armed revolution. All we've got to do is get the Government back to the Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence, and for that I don't believe an armed revolution is necessary. We do have elections, and in the next one, I hope the youth of this country makes its voice felt--which could at least bounce Nixon right out of office.

[Q] Playboy: Don't you think there are millions of middle-aged Americans who will join them in voting against Nixon?

[A] Fonda: Of course. There's a lot of young and old Americans today who have the same kind of ideals. They want to bring democracy back to the people. When I was in Europe dubbing Easy Rider, I was really shocked. The Moratorium went down and Nixon said there's no way that he was going to be impressed or moved; there's no amount of public demonstration that would make him change his mind. All right, he's the President we've elected this time; but this is a democracy. The First Amendment allows us the right to demand redress of grievances from the Government. Democracy also means that the people are the Government and have only entrusted its administration to their elected officials. The people must be the Government all the time, not just every four years. Suddenly, I find that we're getting to be just like the South Vietnamese: They vote for the guy they think is going to be a winner, not for the guy who may be best for their country. We're up to the same gig here. And it's had its repercussions. For myself, I know that for a long time I belonged to the system and felt I had to do right by it, but not anymore. The power groups in this country must realize that people like me believe that the only thing that justifies life is life itself, and that in searching to place anything else above life--whether it's called God, the dollar, America, Russia or China--you can only throw away your life. I'm not ready to throw mine away, and I hope President Nixon will begin to understand that many young people feel the same way.

[Q] Playboy: Suppose, tomorrow morning, you woke up with Nixon's responsibilities; what would you do to alter the nation's policies and priorities?

[A] Fonda: First of all, my inaugural address would be the Declaration of Independence, up to the point where it begins to list King George's offenses. Then I would go about implementing the Bill of Rights by Executive order, like Big Jack was up to and like Bobby would have done. If it were possible, I'd also control the Supreme Court, control it to the point of making sure there was no give and take. There can only be give from the Supreme Court; it cannot barter our freedoms. I think I'd have to do all that very quickly, because I'm sure I'd be killed within the first two months of my Administration. But I don't think it's likely that anyone will come and get me to run for President. More likely, the way things are going, they'll just come and get me. Not only is dissenting from our Government unpopular, it's also becoming a crime. I've marched on Washington and it's usually all very courteous there, but I've also been banged around and kicked in the balls by cops when I was out on Sunset Strip at the wrong time. The way this Administration is going, the repression may just be starting.

[Q] Playboy: If the law came to arrest you for your opinions, would you pick up a gun and try to defend yourself?

[A] Fonda: If it's just jail, then I'd go to jail. But if it's a firing squad, well, I won't accept a firing squad. If they came with guns and the war was here at my front door, I'd have to make a decision. I don't know how many of them I could shoot. If they only sent four guys to get me, and I could kill all four and then split, I think I'd do it. I'm not a pacifist, even though I don't believe in war.

[Q] Playboy: Do you keep guns in your house?

[A] Fonda: Yes, I do. I have a .30-30 rifle, a 12-gauge shotgun, a 9mm automatic, Tom Mix's .44-40--really Tom Mix's gun--and a little .25 automatic. And I'm a crack shot, man. I like shooting. Some people can put basketballs through hoops. I can stick a bullet anyplace I point my finger. But the last thing I want to do is to have to point a gun at another human being in order to save my skin. The sad part is that what I've just laid down could actually take place, because we're living in unbelievably dangerous times right now; and as the months and years go by, our Government--our country, man--becomes more and more oppressive.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think America is going to resemble the society described by George Orwell in 1984?

[A] Fonda: It already is 1984. I wish Aldous Huxley were still alive. He wrote an introduction to Brave New World years after it had first been published in 1939 and said that it amazed him to see that what he thought was pure fantasy and science fiction was all turning out to be true. 1984? It's not too far away, man. Fourteen years. In 14 years, my daughter will be 20. In 14 years, I'll be 44. In 14 years, we might all be dead, because there may not be anything for us to drink or breathe by then. I don't know. I've got to defer to Christ on that one. In the Gospel, the disciples came to Christ and said. "Tell us about the End, tell us about the Kingdom." And Christ said, "Do you know enough about the Beginning to ask me about the End?" So I cop out to Christ. Do we know enough about today to ask about tomorrow? I don't know. 1984 will be an interesting trip. I hope the world makes it through.