Playboy Interview: Henry Fonda

The symbols in his Bel-Air home signify illness, recuperation, activity and creativity. There is a full-time male nurse with him as he slowly moves with the aid of a walker from one room to another. A hospital bed has been installed in a small room off the kitchen. Large cylindrical tanks of oxygen are delivered and stored in a corner of a bedroom. In another room, a new painting of a rumpled denim jacket hanging over a chair awaits his finishing touches. A half-read biography of Thomas Jefferson lies on a night table. On the dining-room table, 350 prints of several of his drawings are waiting to be picked up and sent to a dealer in New York and a gallery in Los Angeles for his first exhibition. And in the Galleria Room, his paintings, drawings and water colors line the walls--still lifes of fruit, a scene from the set of one of his Westerns, a London rooftop, an oil of a potted geranium on a chair and folksy drawings that reveal the Midwesterner: a pitchfork and bridle, three hats, work shoes, a Levi jacket on a pole.

And then there is this: a drawing of a book opened to page 312. Resting on the top half of this page is a magnifying glass that highlights the last paragraph of chapter 21. The final words, carefully printed in a hand that knows something of calligraphy, are these:

"On the highways the people moved like ants and searched for work, for food. And the anger began to ferment."

Below the magnifying glass, the words, much smaller, more difficult to draw, all still remarkably readable, continue: "It was late when Tom Joad drove along a country road looking for the Weedpatch camp...." It is a page from John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," and the artist is the man who brought Tom Joad to life in the 1940 film.

It was the 21st motion picture of Henry Fonda's career, a career that has spanned six decades, including more than 80 films, dozens of plays, two TV series--and two children who have followed his path to acting, fame and fortune. Of all the plays and films he has made, it is "Grapes of Wrath" for which he is most remembered. Tom Joad is a good, kind, decent young man who believes in a better life and who drives his family out West to find it. In his portrayal of Joad, Fonda left his stamp upon a character and a time.

The role wasn't a surprise to critics and fans, who had seen what Fonda could do in such films as Fritz Lang's "You Only Live Once," William Wyler's "Jezebel" and John Ford's "Drums Along the Mohawk." It merely confirmed the fact that Fonda was not merely a leading man--which he was from the very first film he made--but an actor of very high quality, one whom, for so many years since, we have almost taken for granted.

Not among the most versatile of actors, Fonda has lasted because of the feelings of comfort and familiarity he elicits in audiences. His voice is drawn from the Nebraskan soil, from the very heart of America, and it's the voice of everyman: the farmer, the laborer, the judge, the statesman, the cowboy, the fugitive, the wronged man, the angry man, the Best Man.

Fonda was born in Grand Island, Nebraska, in 1905, and began acting 21 years later, when a family friend, Dorothy Brando (who had an infant son Marlon), asked him to take a small part in a local production. When the play closed, he made the decision to be an actor. He went to New York, where he auditioned unsuccessfully for every play he could, then traveled to Cape Cod to work in summer stock. There he joined a group of Princeton and Harvard undergraduates on vacation and became part of the University Players, where he met and befriended Joshua Logan, James Stewart, Myron McCormick and Margaret Sullavan, among others.

Not long afterward, in 1931, he and Sullavan were married; they were divorced a few months later. It was during the Depression and Fonda, Logan, McCormick and Stewart wound up sharing an apartment in New York, living mostly on rice. Eventually, they all found work, and in 1934, Fonda appeared in a comedy revue, "New Faces," with Imogene Coca. Leland Hayward saw him, became his agent and flew him out to Hollywood, where producer Walter Wanger offered him $1000 a week to make two pictures a year. It was all very dazzling for the shy, introverted Nebraskan, who didn't think there was much of a future in the movies.

His first film, "The Farmer Takes a Wife," was based on the play in which he had starred in New York. Fonda was then sharing a house with Stewart in Brentwood. Two years and five pictures later, he met Frances Seymour Brokaw while on location in France. She became his second wife in 1936. Their daughter, Jane, was born a year later and their son, Peter, in 1939. In the six years between his marriage and his enlistment in the Navy in 1942, Fonda appeared in 28 films. After serving three years in the Navy, as a quartermaster in the Pacific and later as a lieutenant, Fonda was awarded the Bronze Star and a Presidential citation. He returned to Hollywood in 1945 and made six more films in three years, including "My Darling Clementine," "The Fugitive" and "Fort Apache." He then left the movies for seven years, returning East to the theater, where he found his longest-running and most memorable stage role in "Mister Roberts," which he played for almost four years without missing a performance--including the night he went on after his wife committed suicide following a mental breakdown in 1950.

Their marriage had slowly disintegrated before that tragic event and they had agreed to divorce. Fonda had found solace with 21-year-old Susan Blanchard, stepdaughter of lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II. They were married in December 1950 and adopted a baby girl, Amy. Five years later, he and Susan were divorced.

After filming "Mister Roberts," Fonda went to Rome to make "War and Peace" with Audrey Hepburn. During that picture, he met Afdera Franchetti. They were married in March 1957. That year, Fonda appeared in a picture directed by Alfred Hitchcock, "The wrong Man," on the heels of the only film he ever produced, "12 Angry Men."

In 1962, he divorced Afdera; and a year later, he met a stewardess named Shirlee Adams. Despite the fact that he resolutely said he'd never marry again, he made her his fifth wife in 1965.

In the theater, Fonda is best known for his work in "Mister Roberts," "The Caine Mutiny Court Martial," "Two for the Seesaw," "A Gift of Time" (which Paul Newman said was "just the god-damnedest, greatest performance I've ever seen"), "Clarence Darrow," "First Monday in October" and, most recently, "Showdown at the Adobe Motel."

An avid deep-sea fisherman, kiteflier, beekeeper and organic gardener, whose favorite fruit is the tart sour apple he grows in his back yard, Fonda is one of those rare actors who have never suffered bad reviews. He was allegedly the inspiration for cartoonist Al Capp's Li'l Abner. His favorite American playwright is Eugene O'Neill and his taste in humor leans toward Woody Allen and away from Mel Brooks.

Although he has been overlooked by his peers at Oscar time, having been nominated for Best Actor only once and losing out to his best friend, Jimmy Stewart, Fonda was given a special Oscar at this year's ceremony for his over-all contribution to the movies. The American Film Institute and the Kennedy Center also honored him for his life achievement.

But Fonda's achievements are obviously not over. His most recent film, "On Golden Pond," which co-stars Katharine Hepburn and his daughter Jane, whose company produced it, is bound to receive critical acclaim and Oscar nominations. Fonda himself is considered by insiders to be the front runner to win, at last, the golden statue for his extraordinary performance.

In addition, his authorized biography, "Fonda: My Life," by Howard Teichmann, was published this year by New American Library; the book was a significant help in preparing this interview.

The attention and acclaim couldn't happen at a better time. Weakened by illness, the 76-year-old actor is determined to continue to work. While recuperating, he consented to this interview.

Playboy sent Contributing Editor Lawrence Grobel (whose interview with James A. Michener appeared in September) to talk with the legendary actor. Grobel's report:

"Katharine Hepburn told Fonda upon their first meeting, 'It's about time.' I felt the same way about this interview. Henry Fonda's been with us so long it's almost as if we know the man--when, in fact, we do not. As he is the first to let you know, he is not Abe Lincoln or Clarence Darrow or Tom Joad. He's had more than his share of personal tragedies, he's suffered through certain roles that he's ashamed of, and there are plenty of people who have angered him along the way of whom he remains unforgiving.

"But the man is a true professional, even in very ill health. Acknowledging that he hadn't wanted to do this interview and that his wife, Shirlee, had practically forced him into it--almost as therapy, it seemed to me--he was gracious and considerate and patient throughout, giving up six consecutive days to answer questions that were at times uncomfortable for him.

"Before I arrived, he spent 15 or 20 minutes walking slowly around the house, so that the few hours we spent talking each day wouldn't be too much of a strain. His voice was hoarse from little use, but his memory was strong. While basically still a quiet and shy man who keeps things to himself, it was obvious that he had enough of being sick. Life, for Fonda, is when the lights are on him, when the camera is rolling, when there's a script to memorize; and he is eager to get out of his pajamas and robe and back into action. For him, it's worth while only when the show must go on."

[A] Fonda: I'm deaf, so talk loud enough for me to hear your questions.

[Q] Playboy: How loud?

[A] Fonda: Well, I've lost 40 percent of my hearing in both ears.

[Q] Playboy: Do you wear hearing aids?

[A] Fonda: What? [Laughter] I got them, but they're not working right. I've got to get to the doctor, but, shit, his office is in Hollywood and I can't get there now.

[Q] Playboy: You're not very fond of doing interviews, are you?

[A] Fonda: I don't look forward to it. I'm doing it because it's important and I've been persuaded. I said no for a long time.

[Q] Playboy: Do you find it exhausting?

[A] Fonda: No. Boring. I don't like to talk about myself, but that's the subject. Of course, I can also talk about the movie--On Golden Pond. It's something special. It's unusual, moving, touching, funny. It was a brilliant script, a wonderful story. Katie Hepburn was magic. Jane playing my daughter was special.

[Q] Playboy: Is it true that it was the first time you and Katharine Hepburn met?

[A] Fonda: Yeah. I'd never met her. I knew Spence--not well, but I knew him--but I'd never met Katie. I met her at a meeting a month before we went into production. She came around to me and said, "Well, it's about time." From the first, it was as though we'd been working all our lives together.

[Q] Playboy: How often does that happen with someone you haven't met before?

[A] Fonda: Rarely.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't Hepburn injure her shoulder and almost back off from the picture?

[A] Fonda: She wouldn't have missed this chance, no way. We gave her three days off while we did other scenes, but beyond that, you'd never guess she had a problem.

[Q] Playboy: Was Jane afraid of Hepburn when they met?

[A] Fonda: I think maybe. She did well and conducted herself all right. They're very close today.

[Q] Playboy: There's a scene in the film in which Jane meets you on the pond and attempts a reconciliation. Considering some of the differences you've had in the past, which we'll be getting into, was it a very emotional scene for both of you?

[A] Fonda: Oh, yeah. It was working almost on two levels: with your own daughter and with an actress playing your daughter. Because of the context and the emotion of the scene, it could become very personal.

[Q] Playboy: Since turning 70, you've had an abundance of good parts, haven't you?

[A] Fonda: There's nothing to say that when you get this age, you're not going to have some of the best things in your whole career. Normally, you're beginning to slow down and take either smaller parts or pictures that you wouldn't do otherwise; but for me it's just been four, five or six of the best things that I've had in my whole 56 years in the theater. There aren't that many parts for an old man, but when there are, I've got 'em and I couldn't be happier. And On Golden Pond is going to knock them right through the roof.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't you make that film during the actors' strike last year?

[A] Fonda: We didn't work for about three days, and then the producer got waivers for us. I'm not quite sure how, but we went back to work.

[Q] Playboy: Did any of you consider not working because of the strike?

[A] Fonda: If we didn't do On Golden Pond then, it was never going to get done.

[Q] Playboy: Because of your schedules?

[A] Fonda: It could only be done in the summer. If it weren't done then, we would have had to wait until the next summer, and who's to know whether Katharine Hepburn and I are still alive by then? You just couldn't afford to wait.

[Q] Playboy: There hasn't been too much written about your illness, but what there has been has been somewhat sensational. Have you been irritated by what some of the media have written about you lately?

[A] Fonda: Only the National Enquirer kind of shit, where you've got to talk to lawyers to decide whether you're gonna sue the shit out of 'em or forget it. The most recent one about me claimed I not only had a heart problem, I was riddled with cancer, and that's a crock, but it's bad publicity.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Fonda: Because the word gets out and the producers think you're not well and you can lose work on account of it.

[Q] Playboy: You mean getting work is still a worry for you?

[A] Fonda: It's the operative problem with actors. I'm not the only one. If you know what you're going to do next, even if it's a year away, you're OK. If you have no idea what your next job is, you think, Well, that's it! I won't work again!

[Q] Playboy: Gossip and scandal sheets aside, what is the exact nature of your illness?

[A] Fonda: Well, the first thing that happened was about seven years ago. I'd never had a problem or been sick in my life. I had to do a narration for a Red Cross spot. I could hardly get to the corner, I was so short of breath. It was very unusual for me. I love walking and suddenly I can't walk 100 feet without grabbing hold of the mailbox and hanging on. I couldn't think what the fuck was happening. To shorten a long story, it turned out my heart was fibrillating; so I went to a hospital and they implanted a pacemaker. No big deal. Done some of the best work in my life in the past six years. Until last year I began to have problems again with shortness of breath and unsteady on my feet. They put me in the hospital again, for three weeks. Nothing but tests. Every kind of test you could think of, trying to determine why my heart was reacting the way it was. They finally put me on a bunch of pills--I needed a pharmacy beside my bed almost with the number of pills I was taking.

I was due to go into rehearsal for Showdown at the Adobe Motel two weeks after leaving the hospital, which I did. I was committed to do the play and I was sure I could get stronger every day. I think if you can get onstage and not fall down, you're good enough. I had to walk with a cane, which was all right, because the character I played walked with a cane. I didn't have any energy at all; I was very sick. Not throw-up sick but weak. Yet there's not a soul who saw that play--and it was a sellout run--who would have guessed that I had a problem. I'd finish a performance, barely get to my dressing room, barely able to change my clothes, go back to the hotel and stagger through the lobby so the people thought I was drunk, I couldn't walk a straight line. That would be March--April last. I felt that I was being overmedicated, taking many too many pills.

I decided to go down to the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla. One of the first things they did was to cut the medicine in half and I began to feel better right away. Then what the hell was the summer? Oh, that was On Golden Pond. I went East and did that and had no problems at all. But I was a bad boy. I was supposed to be on a very low-sodium diet and I went absolutely crazy. I used to take kosher pickles out of the icebox and just sit and chomp on one. It was the worst thing in the world I could do. All summer long, I ate wrong. At the end of that time, on the way home, I went to my New York doctor and I was I don't know how many pounds too heavy with fluid, edema in my legs. He put me on a double-strength diuretic for three days until I lost the fluid and came home. But I never really totally recovered. I was still very unsteady on my feet, fell down a couple of times, and that scared Shirlee, so they put me in the hospital again.

[Q] Playboy: Were you resisting?

[A] Fonda: No. During all those examinations, there was a general feeling that my whole problem was that the outer coating that my heart is encased in had calcium on it, and they had to find out for sure if it was so. Eventually, they operated, found I didn't have a calcium problem, and while they had me open, they put a new pacemaker in. I came hole and that's what I'm recovering from today.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't you also have an operation to remove a tumor on your diaphragm a few years ago?

[A] Fonda: Yeah. That was five or six years ago. It was growing out of my diaphragm and the doctor cut me between the ribs and took it out. Said it was as big as a grapefruit, benign but big.

[Q] Playboy: Having gone through such an experience, do you fear death?

[A] Fonda: Fear death? No.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think much about it?

[A] Fonda: No.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel you're making good progress toward full recovery now?

[A] Fonda: Yeah. Everybody else does, too. The doctors all do.

[Q] Playboy: Do you hate your diet?

[A] Fonda: I sure do. I miss chewing on a kosher pickle. I dream about it.

[Q] Playboy: What else do you dream about?

[A] Fonda: I dream I can dance like Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly.

[Q] Playboy: When you started acting, weren't you once offered a year's contract at $100 a week to be a dancing comic actor in an attempt to create another Astaire?

[A] Fonda: In a way. Or Ray Bolger. Leland Hayward, who was the top agent and who could sell anything, was not excited about me as an actor and never indicated he wanted to handle me until the 1934 Broadway revue New Faces. That's when he made a deal with Dwight Wiman, who was a producer of musicals, who had an idea that he'd send me to Chorus Equity to dance and make a dance comedy. It was 52 weeks to a year, salaried, at $100 a week. That was unheard of, but I turned it down. My dream was not to be a dancer or a comic.

[Q] Playboy: It was, obviously, to be an actor. In pursuit of that dream, didn't Joshua Logan call you the best-known unknown actor in New York?

[A] Fonda: He did. In those days, I was religious in going from office to office. I never missed a day that I didn't go into a producer's or an agent's office. I never slowed down. All the casting gals and the secretaries got to know me so well, they'd just look up and say, "Nothing, Hank." It was during that time that Josh said I was the best-known unknown actor in New York.

[Q] Playboy: How discouraging was that?

[A] Fonda: I never really was discouraged. There were others with me who were in the same position.

[Q] Playboy: That was during the Depression. How did it affect you?

[A] Fonda: I was barely aware of it. We were in a depression as actors all the time. It wasn't any different. We had no money. We existed on rice. No sugar, no salt. Nothing. You just boiled rice.

[Q] Playboy: Yet you had a lot of confidence. After working in summer stock on Cape Cod, you've been quoted as saying you went to New York "damn sure" you were a good actor. What made you so certain?

[A] Fonda: It doesn't sound like me to say that. I'll assume that I did, because I'd been playing the best parts written at that time for young actors and had been accepted by the local community and the reviews were always raves. I suppose that's what made me think of saying it.

[Q] Playboy: When did you first get a feeling for words, which, after all, are what actors fall in love with?

[A] Fonda: I don't think it happened until I was pushed on the stage of a little theater by Do Brando [a family friend and mother of actor Marlon Brando]. Up to that time, I was a painfully self-conscious, shy young man and had very little to say. I didn't think about words at all. Part of the whole attraction of acting was that it was therapy. I was wearing a mask. It was like hiding behind a character. I wasn't self-conscious at all in the theater playing a part.

[Q] Playboy: When did it become something more?

[A] Fonda: It was very gradual that the acting thing became a pull. What I was doing was acting with all of these fun people. I began to realize that acting was a game of make-believe; let's pretend. Like a young kid playing cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians. That's when I began not to think about becoming an actor but understanding what it was that is so exciting about acting. And it's still the fun that it was 56 years ago. It's still make-believe.

[Q] Playboy: You never actually studied acting, did you?

[A] Fonda: We were all learning by experience, by doing it. It never occurred to me or to anybody I knew to study. I wish I had. I wish I'd studied voice, particularly. I've never had a good voice. It doesn't always work. Right now, I lose my voice easily and with this recuperating and being an invalid, it gets weak and I have to force it. I don't think you learn to act in a school, but you get the opportunity to work.

[Q] Playboy: Your acting often seems so natural and effortless, almost as if you're not acting at all. When did you become aware of the effect the theater can have on an audience?

[A] Fonda: My first visit to New York was the most unusual week I'd ever had in my life. I saw nine plays in six days. They were the plays of the season and, as it turns out, the plays of any season. They were all special. It was one of those seasons in which everything was good: Front Page, Coquette, Saturday's Children, The Constant Wife, Tommy. One play I'll never forget was Gods of the Lightning, about Sacco and Vanzetti. Charlie Bickford was in it. It was so real that I walked out of the theater and scowled at cops. I'll never forget it as an experience. I totally forgot that they were actors. I very quickly realized there was a difference between watching an actor you knew was acting and watching somebody who made you forget he was an actor. I began thinking, That's the way I want to be. Please, God, don't let them see the wheels go around, don't let the machinery show. Whatever I do in preparation is to make it as natural and real as possible.

[Q] Playboy: Were your parents opposed to or supportive of your acting ambitions?

[A] Fonda: Only supportive. I was very lucky in my parents. You couldn't ask for a better father and mother. I remember being shocked to go East in 1928 and beginning to hear of contemporaries who hated their parents. I couldn't believe it.

[Q] Playboy: Was your father the biggest influence in your life?

[A] Fonda: I expect so.

[Q] Playboy: Wasn't there a time, when you were 14, when he took you to witness a lynching?

[A] Fonda: It was an experience I will never forget. This young black had been arrested on suspicion of rape and a mob started to collect. My dad's office looked down on the courthouse square and we went up and watched from the window. The mayor, the sheriff and his two assistants rode into the middle of this mob on horseback, trying to calm them. They damn near lynched the mayor. You couldn't believe that they would overpower the law, force their way in, get this guy out of a cell, drag him through the streets, hang him from a lamppost, riddle him with bullets and then drag him from the back of an automobile. It was so horrifying. When it was all over, we went home. My dad never talked about it, never lectured. He just knew the impression it would have on me.

[Q] Playboy: Do you ever see your father in yourself?

[A] Fonda: I've sometimes come on a shop-window at a certain angle where you see a reflection and I've sort of instantaneously said, "My God, it's my father."

[Q] Playboy: Did either of your parents live to see you in the movies?

[A] Fonda: My mother never did. My dad was an invalid when I came out here. Fox Studio screened The Farmer Takes a Wife for him, so he did see one.

[Q] Playboy: What did he think?

[A] Fonda: By the time I got back to visit, it was not on the tips of our tongues to talk about. He'd talk about when he got well, he wanted to buy some property north of Omaha and raise chickens. I said, "Dad, that's what'll happen. I'll set it up for you." He died three or four weeks after my visit. [Pause] When I think today that my mother died at the age of 54 and my dad at 55, that's babies. To think that I've outlived my parents by more than 20 years. It's amazing.

[Q] Playboy: How did they die?

[A] Fonda: Mother had a blood clot and it killed her. I never was sure what the cause of Dad's death was. I just sort of have a vague idea that it had to do with his kidneys. I adored my father and mother.

[Q] Playboy: Were you brought up in a religious household?

[A] Fonda: I was brought up as a Christian Scientist. My grandmother was the first reader and a practitioner. If we got a cold, we'd call Grammy for help. We wouldn't go to a doctor. That's all I knew until I was out of college. Since then, I haven't been inside a church.

[Q] Playboy: Do you believe in God?

[A] Fonda: I'm an agnostic, which turns out to be a very hard thing to understand. I said it on a Donahue show once when somebody asked the question. Everybody thought it meant atheist. An agnostic means I don't know the answers. That's all.

[Q] Playboy: When a 17-year-old Bette Davis wrote you a note proposing marriage, you didn't have an answer then, either, did you?

[A] Fonda: When I was first in New York, I drove my friend Hunter Scott home from Princeton. He didn't want to stay at Princeton, so I met him in New York and we drove down to Princeton before starting our trip back. He had two girls and their mother with him, a Mrs. Davis and her daughters, Bobbi and Bette. Neither of them was particularly attractive, but Hunter was pinned to Bobbi. It turns out that Hunter was pinned to a girl in every city in the United States, almost. It was a thick, foggy night, but we got to Princeton and put them up at the Nassau Inn. The next day, we took the girls to look at the new Princeton stadium by moonlight. Now, I forgot to preface this by saying that Hunter had this great idea that we'd have this contest during our trip. Every time you would kiss a girl, you would get a score; the one who had the higher score won something. This was typical Hunter Scott. He was very juvenile and I'd just go along with it. Now, we've got the girls at the stadium and I'm in the back seat with Bette. I just met this girl and she doesn't really attract me. She wasn't a very pretty girl. But when Hunter got out of the car and walked into the stadium with Bobbi, I knew that he was going to be scoring. I have always been this very shy guy with girls. I went with the same girl for two years when I went to the University of Minnesota and I never kissed her. I'd get her to the door and was always too scared to kiss her. Anyway, now I'm in the back seat with this Bette Davis and some way or other, I just leaned over and gave her a peck, so that I was at least even with Hunter. That's all it was. The next day, we took them to the train, and before we left Princeton to start our trip, I got a letter that was written on the train, from Bette. In essence, it said, "I've told Mother and she will announce our engagement when we get home." I thought, Is that the way it happens? It scared the shit out of me. Never answered it. Never paid any more attention. Never heard anything more.

[Q] Playboy: Soon after that, you got involved with a character named George Billings, who had made a silent film as Abe Lincoln and then hired you at $100 a week to tour with him, doing sketches from Lincoln's life. Was that a lot of money for you then?

[A] Fonda: The most I'd ever made. The most I'd ever dreamed of, and I didn't make that kind of money in the theater again for years.

[Q] Playboy: Did you ever think that one day you'd wind up playing Lincoln yourself?

[A] Fonda: No. When they sent me the script of Young Mr. Lincoln, I turned it down. I even let them test me as Lincoln. I went to the rushes with the producer and the writer the next day and this thing came on the screen and, shit, it was Lincoln! He started to talk and my voice came out of this character and I said, "No way, fellows." And they dropped it.

[Q] Playboy: Until John Ford entered the scene and intimidated you into doing it.

[A] Fonda: Months later, Ford was assigned the film and he sent for me. I didn't know Ford. I knew his work and I used to hang around the set, watching him shoot Stagecoach. I stood there at his desk like a guard with his white hat in his hand and he was the admiral. His first words were something like, "What's all this shit that you don't want to play Lincoln? You think he's the fuckin' President? He's a young, jackleg lawyer from Springfield, for Christ's sake." And that's how he intimidated and persuaded me.

[Q] Playboy: Was Ford as great a director as people say he was?

[A] Fonda: There will never be another Ford. He had instinctively a beautiful eye for the camera. He was so egomaniacal. He never would rehearse, didn't want to talk about a part. If an actor started to ask questions, he'd either take those pages and tear them out of the script or insult him in an awful way. He loved getting his shot on the first take, which for him meant it was fresh. He would print the first take even if it wasn't any good.

[Q] Playboy: That's how he shot that famous last scene in The Grapes of Wrath, in which you say goodbye to your mother and leave the work camp, isn't it? He didn't let you and Jane Darwell rehearse until he was ready to shoot.

[A] Fonda: He would stop the rehearsal the moment Ma and I got into a position where the dialog started. We never did rehearse the dialog until we shot. Jane Darwell and I both knew that it was a hell of a scene. When he finally said, "OK, roll 'em, this is a take," we both sort of let the emotion take hold, and then we realized that that was all wrong. Don't let that emotion spill all over and become embarrassing. Hold it back. We played the scene like holding a horse that was trying to get away. The emotion was there in the back and it colored our faces, our looks, the tone of our voices, and that's all there was to it. We just finished the scene, cut it and walked away.

[Q] Playboy: And Ford never said a word?

[A] Fonda: He didn't have to. You knew how he felt.

[Q] Playboy: Is that the film you're most identified with?

[A] Fonda: I guess so. Yeah.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel there's a part of Tom Joad in you?

[A] Fonda: No.

[Q] Playboy: Steinbeck's wife has said that you became the personification of what her husband stood for. How would you interpret that?

[A] Fonda: I don't know what John meant.

[Q] Playboy: He apparently thought of you when he was writing certain of his characters.

[A] Fonda: I can't believe that.

[Q] Playboy: When did you get to know Steinbeck?

[A] Fonda: After I'd done the film. I was in a restaurant and we just said hello, shook hands. We didn't fall all over each other. There were four or five others and we went on a tour of bars and got drunk and wound up at his apartment over on the East River and we were drunk at dawn. That's how I met him. He turned out to be a neighbor, only two blocks from my house in New York. We were never intimate or close. I think we had admiration for each other.

[Q] Playboy: What did you think of him as a writer?

[A] Fonda: I loved his work. I've read everything he's written. When he died, his widow asked me if I'd come back and read two of John's favorite poems. At the end of the services, I went into the little chapel and was with the widow. She handed me a tin cigar box that Steinbeck had lined with felt and it was his jewel case he had made for himself. In it were the gold studs and cuff links that he wore when he accepted the Nobel Price. I have that upstairs; it's one of my prized possessions.

[Q] Playboy: Wasn't it The Grapes of Wrath that forced you to sign a seven-year contract with Darryl Zanuck at 20th Century-Fox?

[A] Fonda: Yep. I'd worked with Zanuck before, several times. I did Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk and Jesse James and he was always after a contract, but I wasn't interested. Until Grapes of Wrath. That was the bait.

[Q] Playboy: He knew he had you?

[A] Fonda: He said, "I'm not going to let you play Tom Joad if I can't control you." Well, bullshit. I did Grapes of Wrath and I followed it with some of the worst shit that I've had to do in films, so I'll never forgive Zanuck.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of man was he to work for?

[A] Fonda: The only times I saw Zanuck was when they'd cast me in some crock and I'd ask if I could see him. I'd go in there and object to it and say, "Why do I have to do this?" A couple of times, I was lucky enough to get off the lot and be lent over to Paramount or RKO or Warner Bros. to do The Lady Eve, The Big Street with Lucille Ball and The Male Animal. Except for those films, I didn't do anything else at Fox that I could be proud of until The Ox-Bow Incident, and that was made in spite of Zanuck. He hated it. Didn't want to do it. But by the time I got back from the war, he was taking bows for Ox-Bow. It had become a prestige picture.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't Zanuck force Fritz Lang on you after you protested that you didn't want to work with him again?

[A] Fonda: Because Jesse James was so successful, Zanuck said he'd do The Return of Frank James. He came to me and said he'd get Fritz Lang to direct it and I almost flipped out. He didn't seem the right man to direct an American Western at all. Not only that, I'd had such a bad experience with Lang on You Only Live Once I wasn't looking forward to it. I told Zanuck all those things and he said, "Well, he's learned his lesson." He wound up directing the film. He killed three or four horses because he didn't know when to stop running them. Ran them up hills at 9000-feet altitude till their hearts would burst.

[Q] Playboy: Despite not liking Lang, how did you feel about You Only Live Once?

[A] Fonda: It was one of my best films. I recognized that he was one of the giants of our business and his films were incredibly good, but his attitude with actors was so wrong. He treated them like puppets. He wanted to pull the strings. He was very frustrated by sound, because he couldn't talk to them during the scene. He was off to the side of the camera, gesticulating.

[Q] Playboy: You did The Wrong Man for Hitchcock; wasn't he like that as well? Didn't he feel that actors were cattle?

[A] Fonda: Not Hitch, no. He was funny all the time. Hitch would come in and tell a funny story just before he'd say "Roll 'em" into a serious scene. I loved working with Hitch. He blueprinted every scene he did carefully with the production man and the assistant director and the script supervisor, so that any one of the four of them could have lined up the shot and shot it.

[Q] Playboy: Which was totally unlike Ford. Which director did you prefer working for?

[A] Fonda: I'd take Ford. He'd be at the top of the list. With Ford, you were never really sure. He kept things secret from his own script supervisor. He'd dream up little pieces of business in the car driving to location and never say a word to anybody. As soon as he got to the scene, he'd say, "Why don't you do this and do that? Put your feet up on the post. Change position." And they would always turn out to be the things that people would remember.

[Q] Playboy: Did that rub off on your acting as well? Did you learn to improvise through Ford?

[A] Fonda: No, I can't. I've got to have every word that's coming out of my mouth written and laid out.

[Q] Playboy: Marlon Brando says if you can't improvise, you don't belong on a set. Would you say most actors can or cannot improvise?

[A] Fonda: I don't really know. Jane's one who loves to improvise. I'm told that most of Al Pacino's pictures are improvisations. I don't know whether that's true or not.

[Q] Playboy: Did you see Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway?

[A] Fonda: Oh, yeah. Memorable, memorable. I remember going backstage to see Bud and I was so moved I couldn't talk to him. I couldn't open my mouth. I was so emotional.

[Q] Playboy: Since you knew his family and it was his mother who gave you your start, did you know he had it in him?

[A] Fonda: I'd heard about this young kid who came from Illinois who was stirring Broadway. And I saw Truckline Café, in which he had a small part in one scene, but he had pure magic in that. But Streetcar knocked me flat.

[Q] Playboy: Did you know him when he was a boy?

[A] Fonda: He was just a baby when I worked with his mother. When he was six, they moved to Libertyville, Illinois. We kept in touch rarely. I'd only hear about Bud. He was only about 14, but it didn't seem like another day before I began to hear about this crazy son of a bitch in New York who was setting the town on its ear.

[Q] Playboy: How good an actor is Brando?

[A] Fonda: I don't think there's anybody better when he wants to be good. If he cares. I think he's absolutely the best.

[Q] Playboy: Some critics say that about you.

[A] Fonda: I don't think so. I actually feel quite limited. My Middle West accent is too pronounced. I can't lose it enough to play Restoration comedy or Shakespeare at all. I don't have a great ear. I can get away with east Tennessee or west Texas. I've even played a New Englander and got away with it and was proud.

[Q] Playboy: Were you happy with your first film?

[A] Fonda: I wasn't happy with the first three films I did. The first time I was pleased was with The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. [Director] Henry Hathaway and I did a lot of shit from then on for [producer] Walter Wanger.

[Q] Playboy: How did you initially get involved with Wanger?

[A] Fonda: I was under contract to Leland Hayward after I did the play The Farmer Takes a Wife, and he dragged me off to Hollywood for a few days and he sold me to Walter Wanger, who had no idea who I was, to make movies for $1000 a week. Two movies a year in the winter and I could go back to New York in the summer. It was like everything on my terms and I was just dumfounded. I found myself shaking hands with this stranger, agreeing on a deal. I remember walking away from the hotel with Leland and saying, "Now, am I bound by that? Can I get out of it?" Leland never let me forget that.

[Q] Playboy: Did the movies interest you then?

[A] Fonda: No. I had no ambition to be a movie actor. I thought, They're crazy. I'll take their money and go back to New York.

[Q] Playboy: Is the stage still your first love?

[A] Fonda: Oh, yeah. The theater.

[Q] Playboy: Anyway, your move to New York was a few years after your marriage to Margaret Sullavan ended. How long had that marriage lasted?

[A] Fonda: We were married the end of December [1931] and took an apartment in Greenwich Village. We must have been there three or four months before I moved out at her request. It was several months after that when she stopped off in Chicago on the way to California and got a divorce.

[Q] Playboy: What was it--temperaments?

[A] Fonda: I never was temperamental. She was very.

[Q] Playboy: Were you close with her when she died in 1960?

[A] Fonda: No.

[Q] Playboy: Your second marriage was to Frances Seymour Brokaw, mother of Jane and Peter. How did you meet her?

[A] Fonda: She was visiting Europe. I was doing a film with Annabella [Wings of the Morning] and Frances knew the producer, who brought her out to the set. I remember being photographed with her sitting in camp chairs. We had a chance to talk a lot. She was on her way to the Olympics in Berlin and the film was within a week or two of finishing. She said, "Why don't you join me in Berlin and we'll go to the Olympics?" I thought, Why not? We had a beautiful time. She was not only pretty but a fun person to be with. She enjoyed life. We enjoyed being together. She had had her Buick touring car shipped over on the boat and she said, "Let's drive around Europe." I said OK. From Berlin, we drove down to Munich, then to Vienna, Budapest, back to Munich, eventually to Paris, when I proposed. When we got back to New York, I met her family. We were married that first week in New York.

[Q] Playboy: So you married within three months of meeting. Do you consider that a risky thing to do?

[A] Fonda: Today I do. I obviously didn't then. We were very happy for 12, 13, 14 years, with a very successful marriage.

[Q] Playboy: Soon after you were married, Jane was born. Did you feel close to her as a baby?

[A] Fonda: I didn't get as close to Jane and Peter when they were babies as I did with [my adopted child] Amy years later. I used to go home from work and it would be Amy on my lap, get up in the morning and change her diaper. But there wasn't really that closeness with Jane and Peter.

[Q] Playboy: Because you were working a lot?

[A] Fonda: I never was not working, and a lot of it was far away. Many times I would be 12 weeks away from home and I'm sure Jane and Peter were getting to be an age when they wondered where Dad was and why he wasn't home like other dads. I've always regretted it a little bit. There were so many years when they were very young that I couldn't be with them--either because I was in the Navy for three years or because I was on location. But I tried to make up for it. I took Peter fishing for a week the first vacation I had from Mister Roberts. That's when Peter became a fisherman, and he's a damn good one today.

[Q] Playboy: When did they first get to see you in the movies?

[A] Fonda: I don't remember with Jane. With Peter, their mother gave a birthday party and screened Drums Along the Mohawk. I wasn't there, but their mother told me afterward when the Indians were chasing Dad, it scared Peter so that he left the room and played out in the hall the rest of the afternoon and didn't go to the movies again for years. It was traumatic for him.

[Q] Playboy: Does he remember it today?

[A] Fonda: He remembers it and talks about it. During the war, I was in the Pacific and their mother had a party like that and showed Chad Hannah. It involved a circus and how I became a ringmaster. Peter sneaked up the side of the projector until he got to the screen and he put his hand up to touch my character. A couple of years later, when the war was over, I got home in the afternoon and the kids were still in school. So I drove the station wagon to the school and parked it at the foot of the driveway. When Peter came down, he saw the car, then he saw me and he became very shy and walked slowly until he got up to the car and said, "Hello, Chad."

[Q] Playboy: How old was he?

[A] Fonda: Six.

[Q] Playboy: Before you enlisted in the Navy, you made a lot of, well, lousy pictures, didn't you?

[A] Fonda: Just before the war, when it got closer and closer to the time that I knew I was going to be leaving and the studio knew it, they just crowded me into films and made as many as they could before I got away. Some of them were very forgettable. But you're under contract; you do what they tell you to do.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't you also have to date actresses they told you to, to help keep the star system in the public eye?

[A] Fonda: I only once dated somebody I was told to. Marlene Dietrich. It was very strange. I didn't know her and it was just like an assignment. She needed an escort to an opening, and I drove down to her house in my little Ford and waited for her to come down. When she did, it was the star's entrance down the staircase. We didn't go in my Ford, we went in her chauffeured limousine. I just sat there like a bump on a log. It was a typical opening night, lined with photographers. I remember this long walk beside Marlene Dietrich, being photographed a lot. We didn't have a great deal of conversation. She was a glamorous star. I don't remember her movies too much.

[Q] Playboy: Getting back to your time in the Navy, were you gung ho about the war?

[A] Fonda: Yes. I was a typical eager beaver who wanted to shoot at Japanese. I wanted to go where the action was.

[Q] Playboy: How significant were those years?

[A] Fonda: I didn't like one minute of them. A lot of it was going to school, learning navigation, signaling. I was on a destroyer for a year as a quartermaster; that's assistant to the navigator. That I enjoyed. I sailed through this boot camp for officers and came out at the head of the class. That impressed the shit out of people.

[Q] Playboy: And you received a Bronze Star for helping sink a Japanese submarine.

[A] Fonda: One of the things that I learned in my various schooling was antisub warfare: how to find submarines, where to look for them and what to do when you know there is going to be one in the area. Through our secret code, we were given the news that a submarine was taking off from Tokyo. I organized a Marine squadron that searched a certain pattern. It was prearranged. Search planes flew another pattern and they found the submarine and sank it.

[Q] Playboy: Do you still have the medal?

[A] Fonda: Peter lost it. I'd given it to him.

[Q] Playboy: Were you upset with him?

[A] Fonda: No; it meant nothing to me.

[Q] Playboy: How did you come to know about the dropping of the atomic bomb before it was dropped?

[A] Fonda: We briefed the pilot about where he was going and what to look for. The next thing I remember was hearing about Hiroshima, which sort of took me back, I must say. I had no idea what kind of devastation it would create.

[Q] Playboy: In retrospect, do you think it was the right thing to do?

[A] Fonda: I can only wish that they had never thought of making it in the first place and that there was no problem today about nuclear fission or power stations or anything else. I'm against all of it. I'm sorry that anybody who learned that it was possible said, "Let's go ahead." I wish they'd just said, "That's dangerous, let's don't touch it."

[Q] Playboy: Do you think it will eventually destroy us?

[A] Fonda: I wouldn't be surprised. Not necessarily as a weapon of war; but what are they going to do with the waste? They keep looking and trying to figure out what to do with it. In the meantime, we're getting more and more of it. That's where the danger is. Take the Love Canal, for instance. Jane and Tom were there and gave me details. That's so terrifying, and yet it's going on today. There are still companies that are illegally dumping poisonous waste in yards and don't say anything about it.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think there's any way to stop it?

[A] Fonda: I don't think it's possible. Too many people think it's progress.

[Q] Playboy: Soon after you returned from the Navy, you began a very successful run playing Mister Roberts on Broadway. Frances, however, was not well by then, was she?

[A] Fonda: She was sick off and on for three or four years.

[Q] Playboy: Did you find yourself losing your temper often with your children?

[A] Fonda: I lost my temper a lot. I think they would say that.

[Q] Playboy: Jane recalls your rages as being "terrifying--not Mediterranean rages but rages of frustration, tension and repression." She said they were as much against yourself as anyone else.

[A] Fonda: I would guess. Uh, yeah.

[Q] Playboy: Were you aware of how strong your rage was? Did it have to do with your personal or your professional life?

[A] Fonda: I'm not sure I understand what Jane means, but I surely had nothing to be upset about in my professional life. My personal life was disintegrating, but very slowly. I wasn't even aware of it for a long time.

[Q] Playboy: When did you become aware of it?

[A] Fonda: After we moved East and I was doing Mister Roberts. That's when Frances first had to go to a home for disturbed people. It was not a place where you're committed, but she was in and out of there two or three times over a period of a year.

[Q] Playboy: Did you ever know what caused her disturbance?

[A] Fonda: No.

[Q] Playboy: Was it difficult to live with her then?

[A] Fonda: Well, it wasn't easy. A lot of that I've put out of my mind, so there's almost a blank. I never dreamed that it would be anything permanent. It was just a bore to have a wife who wasn't always well.

[Q] Playboy: Is this difficult to talk about?

[A] Fonda: It ain't easy. Frances' suicide is just never easy to talk about. I don't like to be reminded of what happened. It was a tragedy.

[Q] Playboy: Were you at all prepared for that kind of tragedy?

[A] Fonda: I don't know anybody in the family who was prepared for that.

[Q] Playboy: How did Jane and Peter find out?

[A] Fonda: They were ten and 12--too young to be told the truth, so we just simply said that Mother had died in the hospital. They've both got their own stories about how they found out, hearing other children talk about it or reading it. I've been criticized for not telling them the truth and letting them find out that way. I still think I was right. Anyway, it was a tragedy and that's the way things happened.

[Q] Playboy: When they found out, did they blame you? Were they angry with you?

[A] Fonda: No. Oh, no. There was never dialog about it at all. I never learned from them when they found out.

[Q] Playboy: How much of Frances do you see in Jane and Peter?

[A] Fonda: Very little.

[Q] Playboy: You see more of yourself in them?

[A] Fonda: Yeah. Frances' oldest daughter, Pam, lives in Rome, married to an Italian ambassador. She's very much like her mother.

[Q] Playboy: In what ways?

[A] Fonda: Looks. Nervousness, which Frances didn't show right away. But Pam is so jumpy that it makes you nervous to be with her.

[Q] Playboy: On the day Frances took her life, you went to the theater that night to do Mister Roberts. Was that the most difficult performance of your career?

[A] Fonda: Probably. Leland and Josh persuaded me that I should go on, that it would be the best thing for me. I was just too numb to argue or even think about it. I just went out and played the show. I would eventually have had to go back and pick it up. If I'd waited two days or a week, the first performance after that would have been tougher than the one I played.

[Q] Playboy:Mister Roberts ran for almost four years. Isn't it unusual for an actor, especially a movie star, to stay in a play for that long?

[A] Fonda: I am unusual. I don't know anybody else who likes long runs. Most actors say, "Shit, how could you do it night after night after night?" I enjoyed it. I wouldn't have missed a performance and didn't--1700 performances. And the last, at the Biltmore here in Los Angeles, was a better performance than the one on opening night--and opening night was as exciting as you could ask a theater to be. The audience went absolutely out of their minds, standing on their seats, hollering, whistling. It was the only time I ever had to make a curtain speech. They wouldn't stop applauding.

[Q] Playboy: What did you say?

[A] Fonda: Something like, "That's all they wrote. If you want us to start again at the beginning, we'd love to." And they went into convulsions all over again.

[Q] Playboy: How could the last night be better than that?

[A] Fonda: You've grown. If you don't grow in a part, you should get in another business. It should never become mechanical. I can tell right away when I'm in the audience if the actors are bored and they're listening and their eyes are on you if you are talking, but they're thinking, Where will I have supper tonight? You can't do that. It's a great concentration. It's a great discipline. It's a challenge in the theater that I enjoy.

[Q] Playboy: Are you ever nervous before going on?

[A] Fonda: Never. On the contrary. I'm called a neurotic son of a bitch by my peers because I don't go and throw up in a corner on opening nights. I can't wait! I'm gonna get out there and I'm not going to be myself and people aren't going to be looking at me! I'm going to be smart, like Clarence Darrow. A character, like Mister Roberts.

[Q] Playboy: Logan, who co-wrote and directed Mister Roberts, has written that you were difficult to work with and that you dominated him. Did you feel that?

[A] Fonda: No, I never felt that. I know Josh does. Josh was and is an awfully sensitive man. You can't criticize him at all. I did several times and it used to drive him right up the wall.

[Q] Playboy: How different was the movie from the play?

[A] Fonda: I was not happy with the film. Mainly with Ford, who I felt was the one man in the world to direct it. Turned out not to be the one man. He was such an egomaniac. He didn't like to duplicate anything that Josh had done in the theater. He kept changing scenes. You can't play it for almost four years like I did and not become a purist. You don't fuck around with something that works as well as it did. We're lucky that he had his kidney attack and operation and he had to be replaced when the picture was half finished.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't Ford actually hit you when you began to criticize his direction?

[A] Fonda: Yeah. Leland said, "Pappy wants to see you." I went in and Ford knew that I was unhappy with the way he'd handled the scene that afternoon, and so he said, "All right, what's the matter? Let's have it." So I told him in the nicest way I could that when Leland asked me who should direct this film, I said, "There's only one--John Ford. He's queer for the Navy, he's an outdoor man, an outdoor-location director, a man's director, everything you could think of. But Pappy," I said, "you're playing around with things that worked beautifully in the theater and you're changing them." I don't know how far I got before he stood up and pushed me back over a table. It was more like a shove than a hit. Shit, I wasn't gonna fight the old man, so I just got up and left the room. A few minutes later, he came to my room to apologize, and from then on, it was almost embarrassing. He'd ask me before every scene, almost sarcastically, "Do you approve? Is this all right with you?" He stuck closer to the script from then on.

[Q] Playboy: Logan wrote that James Cagney was like a Disney character in the film. Do you agree?

[A] Fonda: No. But all the subtleties in the play were lost in the film and I blame Ford for that. It's hard to say these things about a film that everybody universally loved and saw 20 times. You can't tell them that you don't know what you've missed when you didn't see the play.

[Q] Playboy: After your problems with that film, you followed it with more problems on your next, War and Peace, which Dino De Laurentiis produced. What was your opinion of De Laurentiis?

[A] Fonda: I hated him. He didn't speak a word of English. I had my own ideas about Pierre. I felt he was not a leading man. I tried to get wardrobe to make me look like Pierre and Dino vetoed all that. His idea was that he had cast Mel Ferrer and me to be the two romantic leads opposite Audrey Hepburn. I'm doing my best on the set to make a character out of Pierre: I got the carpentry man to get me some rimless glasses. Dino would see me wearing them and through an interpreter would go to [director] King Vidor and say, "Tell Fonda to take those off." I put them back on the minute he was off the set, but it wasn't easy.

[Q] Playboy: You've made a lot of pictures that weren't easy in that regard.

[A] Fonda: I did some awful, awful things and I'm ashamed of them.

[Q] Playboy: What film was the most awful of them all?

[A] Fonda:Sex and the Single Girl. I turned it down when it was offered to me. My agents talked me into it, because they said, "You son of a bitch, you're not going to make a living out of Ox-Bow Incidents and 12 Angry Mens. They can win awards, but they don't make any money. In order to indulge yourself to do films like that, every so often you've got to be in box-office pictures." They were right. It was a terrible picture, but it was box office.

[Q] Playboy: What was your role?

[A] Fonda: I was married to Betty Bacall. I don't remember, really. I hated the director [Richard Quine], who never did anything else that I've heard of.

[Q] Playboy: Earlier you said that You Only Live Once was one of your best films. What are some of the others you've liked?

[A] Fonda:The Grapes of Wrath has got to be right up on the list. And 12 Angry Men is one of the best; it's become a minor classic, known around the world. My Darling Clementine was a very special Western. The Ox-Bow Incident was a special film. The Lady Eve. A picture called Slim, a B picture but a very good film that was overlooked.

[Q] Playboy: You've left out On Golden Pond.

[A] Fonda: Oh, yeah. I think it may turn out to be the best thing I've done.

[Q] Playboy: There's a lot of talk in Hollywood about this being your Oscar-winning performance.

[A] Fonda: I never think about an Oscar.

[Q] Playboy: Have you felt cheated that you've never won one for a particular film?

[A] Fonda: Shit, no, it would embarrass me. The only time I was ever nominated, I got out of the country just to avoid having to be there. Getting the special Oscar was difficult, because everybody knows how I feel about the Oscar. Yet getting it the way I did was all right, because it was for a body of work, and that was an honor.

[Q] Playboy: Was it also a moving experience for you?

[A] Fonda: Yeah, because the audience was so sensational. They wouldn't stop applauding; it was a standing ovation. I kept standing there with Bob Redford for what seemed like five minutes before I could say a few words.

[Q] Playboy: So if you're nominated this year you won't attend?

[A] Fonda: No.

[Q] Playboy: Not even if your wife insists?

[A] Fonda: She can't. She says she's going to, but there's no way.

[Q] Playboy: What if Shirlee and Jane and Peter all insist you go?

[A] Fonda: I will not be there and put up with that shit! I watch it on TV and five contenders for Best Actor are all out there and at various times the camera will go to them for close-ups.... The idea of the camera coming to me while they're naming the other actors, then whoever wins kisses their wife or girl or husband and runs up there and takes it and makes a speech.... No way!

[Q] Playboy: But if you did win it this year, you wouldn't turn it down, would you?

[A] Fonda: No. I'll let Jane accept it or the producer ... and I won't be as proud of it as I am of the special Oscar, but I won't do a George Scott, no.

[Q] Playboy: You attended the ceremonies for the life-achievement awards presented to you by the American Film Institute and the Kennedy Center. Were they meaningful for you?

[A] Fonda: The Kennedy Center was, particularly at the end, when they had a Navy choral group onstage and they started singing Anchors Aweigh and then sang The Red River Valley, which is Grapes of Wrath. I cried like a baby, [Fonda's voice chokes] tears just streaming out of my eyes. I just couldn't stop crying. The Navy group came up both aisles in line and they saluted, "Good night, Mr. Fonda." It just broke me up.

[At this emotional point, friend and fellow actor George Peppard enters the room. It is one of his regular visits. He puts a large tomato on the coffee table in front of Fonda. "That's my biggest," he says. "It's a beauty," Fonda says. "You always come at a time when I can't talk to you, George." George leaves, promising to call.]

[Q] Playboy: Do you see many of your friends while you're recuperating?

[A] Fonda: Jim [Stewart] comes out here about every three days to sit with me here. He's my closest friend. And Barbara Stanwyck always comes to visit when I'm not well. Sends the goddamnedest things to eat. She came the other day with five different boxes from a Beverly Hills dessert store. God, there were pecan pies and chocolate pies and lemon cake. I was madly in love with Barbara Stanwyck.

[Q] Playboy: Was it a Platonic love?

[A] Fonda: Well, we were both married, so it was Platonic. She was my favorite person. A damn good actress, too. I loved her then and I still do and Shirlee's learned to live with it.

[Q] Playboy: While you're recovering, what occupies your thoughts?

[A] Fonda: I think about my garden a lot, frustrated that I can't get out there. I was a naughty boy yesterday, because I took my walker out to the front of the greenhouse. I'd planted tomatoes and bell peppers and melons before I went in the hospital and they're all of them dried up. There's so much that has to be done and I'm just not ready. Shirlee caught me out there and just blew her stack. I asked her to put the walker in the back of the car and take me to the Westwood Garden Center, 'cause there're so many things that I can still get to plant. It isn't too late: lettuce, peppers, several other things. She wouldn't listen to it. Said, "You're not ready."

[Q] Playboy: Shirlee's taking very good care of you. Would you say she's changed you any?

[A] Fonda: In many, many ways. She is so outgoing, so extroverted. And I'm so introverted that she's been a great help to me.

[Q] Playboy: Does she give you more confidence?

[A] Fonda: I think so. She's a perfect companion for me.

[Q] Playboy: How did you meet her?

[A] Fonda: A mutual friend was working for Rogers and Cowan. They handled me at the time. He had to have a meeting with me and he didn't want to do it alone. He asked Shirlee if she'd come along. We went to La Scala. At the end of the dinner, I went off with Shirlee. She was a stewardess for American Airlines at the time and wasn't always in town. I used to drive out to the airport and pick her up when I knew she was coming in on a certain flight. We saw each other all the time and eventually she went with me when I had a location in Spain. We were together about three years. I didn't think I'd ever get married again. Then I thought, Well, shit, this is a very successful relationship, let's make it permanent and legal. I asked her and she went into shock.

[Q] Playboy: Your reputation is that you never married your lives; they all married you.

[A] Fonda: I'd say so. Except Shirlee.

[Q] Playboy: So with women, you were more often the pursued than the pursuer.

[A] Fonda: That's true.

[Q] Playboy: Do you remember the first time you ever slept with a girl?

[A] Fonda: The first couple of times was a prostitute and it was very unsuccessful. Turned me off.

[Q] Playboy: In retrospect, are you surprised that you've been married five times?

[A] Fonda: It not only surprises me, I'm ashamed. I'm really ashamed to have to admit to anybody that I've been married that many times. It just doesn't go with anybody else in the Fonda family.

[Q] Playboy: After you married Shirlee, Jane thought you should go into psychoanalysis, because any man who married five times must be unhappy. Did you know she said that?

[A] Fonda: No, but it doesn't surprise me. She'd be the first to say she was sorry she said it if she was reminded today.

[Q] Playboy: How did your different marriages affect your children? Especially the third, to Oscar Hammerstein's stepdaughter, Susan, whom you were seeing while Frances was still alive?

[A] Fonda: They liked her very much, got along well with her. She was wonderful with them and when we married, they moved in with us in our apartment in New York. Susan was a very good mother for them. They were ten and 12 years old and she was a great help. They still adore Susan today. Didn't like Afdera at all. Who am I forgetting?

[Q] Playboy: Just Shirlee.

[A] Fonda: They adore Shirlee.

[Q] Playboy: You once described your fourth wife, Afdera, as being one of the craziest persons you've ever known. In what ways?

[A] Fonda: I don't like to criticize anybody in print and I'm just going to bow out and not answer. She's a character. I was going to say social butterfly, but it's more than that, because she had a compulsion for entertaining, which I never did a lot of, still don't; but we had dinner parties almost every night at the house in New York and when we lived in the south of France. There was a lunch every day for 20 to 30 people.

[Q] Playboy: Did you know them all?

[A] Fonda: No. If I did, I knew them casually as friends of hers. Italians, mostly.

[Q] Playboy: How long were you married to her?

[A] Fonda: About three years.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't she introduce you to Hemingway?

[A] Fonda: That was in Pamplona or Madrid. Afdera knew him and she took me. He was pathetic and it was sad to meet him. Ava Gardner was there. He was sort of half drunk, his beard was scaly, you could see scale on his skin. He just looked unclean.

[Q] Playboy: Was he writing anything then?

[A] Fonda: I don't believe so.

[Q] Playboy: How long was that before he took his life?

[A] Fonda: Several years.

[Q] Playboy: Getting back to Susan for a moment, what was she like?

[A] Fonda: She was a beautiful girl, like Alice in Wonderland. Long blonde hair and she was gay, she was fun. I'm no good at this. You asked what she was like and I don't know how to answer.

[Q] Playboy: Just what comes to mind when you think of her?

[A] Fonda: We had a lot of good times until we went to Rome and she got bored. I was working and she was left alone a lot and by the end of the summer, she decided she was going home and she did and took Amy. By that time, we'd adopted Amy. And Jane and Peter had to go back to school, so she flew back with all of them and got them started in school and wrote me that it was all over.

[Q] Playboy: How did you respond?

[A] Fonda: I was heartbroken. I couldn't believe it. I begged her on the telephone not to give up, but it never worked again. I must say for years after that, we were very unfriendly. At least I was. I couldn't be friendly with her.

[Q] Playboy: Can you see now that she might have had cause to leave?

[A] Fonda: I don't blame any wife for having got fed up with me, because I was impossible. Shirlee's lasted 19 years because I've mellowed and I'm easier to live with, obviously.

[Q] Playboy: After you married Susan and went to the Virgin Islands on your honeymoon, didn't you have to rush back when you heard that Peter had shot himself with a Civil War pistol?

[A] Fonda: We were getting ready to go to bed when one of the local natives who worked for the hotel came running in, saying he'd heard on the radio that my son had been in a shooting incident and that I should come home. Well, that's hard to understand: shooting incident. What does that mean? He shot somebody? Somebody shot him? Not knowing anything more than that, Susan and I packed up, took a sailboat to where a main boat came from San Juan. In the morning, we flew to Puerto Rico on a flight that I chartered, where we caught a Pan American flight, still not having heard anything more. In Bermuda, I had a chance to call New York. I got Grandma Seymour on the phone and she gave me the details. Peter had shot himself accidentally. He was in grave condition but was not going to die. It was well after midnight when I got to the hospital and went into Peter's room. He was lying there with tubes in him. I stayed with him a couple of days until it was obvious that he was going to be all right.

[Q] Playboy: Coming soon after his mother's tragedy and your remarriage, did you ever think he was depressed and that it might not have been an accident?

[A] Fonda: No, because the story of what happened goes against all that. Peter had wanted a gun for a long time and I wouldn't get him one. I eventually bought him a .22 that he was to use only when we were together. We would go off into the woods and shoot at tin cans. Otherwise, it was kept locked in the closet. Now, Grandma Seymour was living with the children and one day Peter was going to the home of a friend's uncle and he wanted to take his gun. He said he didn't want to take any bullets, so his grandmother couldn't think of any reason why that wouldn't be all right, so she let him take the gun. They get there and the chauffeur drives them to a certain spot and waits in the car, with these three kids 50 feet away. One kid had an old relic pistol, the other kid had a shotgun. The three of them played with these guns, throwing things in the air and shooting at 'em. It's a wonder they didn't kill each other. The old relic was the only one that wouldn't shoot and Peter said, "Let me try." He took a .22 bullet from the other character and was trying to force it into the relic and it wouldn't go in. He had the barrel right in his gut and it went off. The chauffeur put him in the car and drove him to the hospital, which saved his life. So I just don't believe that it was anything but an accident.

[Q] Playboy: Peter has been quoted as saying that a few years later, he was attacked by three hoods, who hung him on a fence in New York and drove nails through his hands. What do you remember about it?

[A] Fonda: [Angry] Fuckin' lie!

[Q] Playboy: Peter tells that story.

[A] Fonda: He's got the goddamnedest imagination and he's a compulsive liar. Now, I shouldn't say that about my son, but it's not a true story! It's not possible. He was living at home and that I would see this boy every day and not know he'd been crucified with nails through his hands? There's no way!

[Q] Playboy: Why would he tell that story publicly? Was it to get at you?

[A] Fonda: I don't know. He likes to fantasize, I guess. I remember his telling me that story and I believed it as he was telling it, late at night. It was a long, nightmarish story and I didn't begin to doubt it until later. Never talked to him again about it, but his wife told me that he had told her the story and then admitted it was not true.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think he felt he had to come up with something like that to grab your attention?

[A] Fonda: Who knows? I don't know.

[Q] Playboy: Wasn't Peter once arrested for growing marijuana in his back yard?

[A] Fonda: He rented a house as an office and was letting a couple of pals live there. Now, who was growing the marijuana I'll never know, but it was being grown and they found it. I appeared at the trial just as a character witness. He was acquitted and that's really the most I can tell you.

[Q] Playboy: Did you ever ask him if he was growing it?

[A] Fonda: No.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think it's wrong to grow your own?

[A] Fonda: No.

[Q] Playboy: As long as it's done with good compost?

[A] Fonda: Yeah. [Grins]

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever smoked it?

[A] Fonda: Once. I was a close friend of a band that played in a tearoom for dancing after the theater. I didn't know what marijuana was. They handed it to me. I had maybe three drags and got higher than a kite. It was funny; everything slowed down. It would take 15 minutes to walk across the room, it seemed.

[Q] Playboy: If it was a pleasurable experience, why didn't you smoke it again?

[A] Fonda: I don't know why not. I didn't have the inclination then any more than I have today for that kind of stimulant.

[Q] Playboy: Would you say that Peter's early use of drugs and Jane's early sexual activities were acts of rebellion against you?

[A] Fonda: I think so, yeah.

[Q] Playboy: Did you ever discuss it with them?

[A] Fonda: No.

[Q] Playboy: How long did their rebellion last?

[A] Fonda: Not long. A year. They were both successful right away and it wasn't necessary to rebel after that.

[Q] Playboy: Still, Peter was quoted as saying that while you depicted great American honesty, you had no way of telling them about your life; they weren't part of it.

[A] Fonda: I don't know what he meant. I don't talk about myself a lot. That's all.

[Q] Playboy: How did it affect you, though, to hear what your children said about you in public?

[A] Fonda: It was all happening at a time when they made the decision to go into acting. It was a classic rebellion. I like to think I was smart enough to recognize it as such and not let it touch me. A lot of it did. I was hurt. But it didn't take long and they came to me and apologized for the things they said that were hurtful.

[Q] Playboy: Have either of them ever come to you for professional advice?

[A] Fonda: No, they don't come to me. We talk, but not in the sense of advice.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel closer to either of them?

[A] Fonda: Not really. Jane is away so much. She calls all the time from China or London or Africa or South Africa. She'll come home and call to say, "I was coming this afternoon, but I can't, I've got to go to San Francisco to make a speech." So I don't see Jane as much as you would think I would. I don't see Peter that much, either, but he's more often in and out. But I always enjoy seeing them and being with them.

[Q] Playboy: Have you seen all of your children's films?

[A] Fonda: Yeah.

[Q] Playboy: But you haven't seen all of yours, have you?

[A] Fonda: No. That doesn't seem to me unusual.

[Q] Playboy: Can you be objective when you watch them or are you a proud father?

[A] Fonda: A little of both. Jane's films, particularly, I get totally taken in. They're so good. I think she gets better every time she goes to bat. There's nobody like her; she's unique. Peter's mostly are B pictures that not even he is proud of. Most of the time he says, "Don't bother, Dad, I did it for the bucks so that I can do this on my own," and then he'll do The Hired Hand, which is a little classic; a beautiful, beautiful film.

[Q] Playboy: Jane's early films weren't very good. When did you start thinking she was good?

[A] Fonda: Maybe Klute. The scene in Klute that I feel won her the Oscar was where she is talking to her analyst and the camera is on Jane. I remember thinking, Shit, what a writer to find those words, they are so real, so right. I asked her about it and she said it was an improvisation.

[Q] Playboy: Not being a believer in the Oscars, what do you think of Jane's two?

[A] Fonda: Proud, of course. I know it meant a lot to her, not only as an award but because it could mean money. Success for the films that she'd produced herself. They could make another million or so. That was important.

[Q] Playboy: How important is money?

[A] Fonda: It's very important. More important for Jane than for me, because she uses it in so many ways. Almost all the good money she makes goes to the Campaign for Economic Democracy. I just need money to be able to live this way and I've got to continue to make it. I can't start living on savings.

[Q] Playboy: Has your salary risen dramatically over the years?

[A] Fonda: I've pretty much gotten the same salary. Well, no, it increased. It's not the same as it was when I made my first films, when I got $1000 a week. Then I got $5000 a film. Eventually, I got $100,000 and then $200,000. I can't think of one that made me more than another one.

[Q] Playboy: Was it your need for money that led you to do those GAF commercials?

[A] Fonda: I resisted it for many years. Like a TV series, it's a problem to find something that doesn't make you sick to your stomach. I sweated through seven years with GAF and was not unhappy when we quit. The one I did for Lifesaver was fun because we did it in Omaha on the block where I lived when I was eight, talking about those days. Two girls are looking at me and say, "Aren't you Jane Fonda's father?"

[Q] Playboy: How would you describe Jane and Peter to the seven people in America who may not have heard of them?

[A] Fonda: You ask questions that take such a long time for me to find answers. Jane is so smart that I'm in total awe of her--brilliant, talented ... scary. She's got so many things going that I don't see how she keeps them all juggled in the air.

Peter is also scarily smart. He seems to know something about any question you ask him. He is also a writer-producer-director-actor. Spends most of his time on his ranch in Montana.

[Q] Playboy: When the U.S.O. invited you to tour in Vietnam, how did your children react?

[A] Fonda: Peter had very little to say about it. Jane didn't understand it at all. I had a lot of explaining to do to Jane, but I think she eventually understood. When the U.S.O. asked me if I would go on a handshake tour, I said I was opposed to the war. They persuaded me it didn't make any difference, we had thousands of troops over there and it would mean a lot to see somebody from home. We rarely were in an area in which there was gunfire. I don't know that I saw anything that shocked me or reminded me what a crock the whole thing was.

[Q] Playboy: How did you react when Jane went to Hanoi and was called a traitor?

[A] Fonda: I was very sorry. I thought she made a lot of mistakes. Told her so when she got back. She knew it and was learning every day. She was making mistakes and was trying hard to learn.

[Q] Playboy: Were you upset that she went or about what happened once she was there and spoke on Hanoi radio?

[A] Fonda: It was what she did when she was there that was upsetting.

[Q] Playboy: Antagonized a lot of people.

[A] Fonda: Oh, my God, I'll say.

[Q] Playboy: How did you deal with that?

[A] Fonda: I didn't have to dial with it.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't you once say that she won't be satisfied until they burn her like Joan of Arc?

[A] Fonda: I never said it. I think Vadim said it.

[Q] Playboy: What was your opinion of Roger Vadim when Jane married him?

[A] Fonda: I always liked Roger. He was a very civilized man, very smart. He's got a bad reputation with the ladies, and that may be so, but I visited them when they lived together in the country outside Paris and they were a very happy couple.

[Q] Playboy: When Jane married Tom, did you like him?

[A] Fonda: It took time.

[Q] Playboy: Were you supportive of his politics?

[A] Fonda: Oh, yeah.

[Q] Playboy: Did you think he had a chance to win the Democratic Senatorial nomination when he ran against John Tunney?

[A] Fonda: He damn near made it. It scared the shit out of Tunney.

[Q] Playboy: Could you see Tom as a future Presidential candidate?

[A] Fonda: Tom Hayden? Tom could do anything he wanted to. He's so smart he scares you. I don't think he'll ever try it and I don't think he could make it, but if he did, he'd be good.

[Q] Playboy: How about Jane for President?

[A] Fonda: For President? Why not? Why not? She'd be good at anything she tried.

[Q] Playboy: Would you be surprised if she entered politics?

[A] Fonda: I would be. I don't think she has any ambition to and has said as much.

[Q] Playboy: You didn't think she had any ambition to be more than a model, either. How do you think the media have treated Jane?

[A] Fonda: She very gradually became the character the media have helped to build, and I don't know if I ever felt surprised about it.

[Q] Playboy: Did you always support her?

[A] Fonda: Oh, yeah.

[Q] Playboy: We haven't really touched on your adopted daughter, Amy. What does she do?

[A] Fonda: She's getting her doctorate in clinical psychology.

[Q] Playboy: In a magazine article about her, she was quoted as saying, "In our family's careers, it's usually 'me, me, me'--and that drives me up the wall."

[A] Fonda: I never thought of Amy reacting or realizing or thinking about that. I don't think it's true, except that probably to Amy, when she's with us, there's more talk about what Peter and Jane are up to than about what Amy's up to and that's why it seems like "me, me, me."

[Q] Playboy: Are you close to her?

[A] Fonda: Very, very close. I talk to her two or three times a week.

[Q] Playboy: Are you also close to your grandchildren?

[A] Fonda: Very. They come over all the time when they're in town.

[Q] Playboy: Will there be a third generation of Fondas in the theater?

[A] Fonda: Justin and Bridget [Peter's children] can't wait to be actors. They're 14 and 17.

[Q] Playboy: Brando said he doesn't believe movie stars can be artists. What do you think?

[A] Fonda: I think De Niro is an artist; Duvall is an artist. It's such a special talent that they've got, what else can you call it?

[Q] Playboy: How about yourself?

[A] Fonda: I don't think about myself like that.

[Q] Playboy: John Houseman, who directed you in Darrow, said that you always reach a point in a production when you become insecure and lose faith in the project. True?

[A] Fonda: It's often true. Certainly with Darrow. I thought it wasn't going to work at all. It was awkward, being alone onstage and pretending you're talking to somebody else. I was very insecure about the play. I couldn't have been more wrong.

[Q] Playboy: So once something's in rehearsal, you're no longer the best judge of what's right for you?

[A] Fonda: Yeah.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't Edward Albee write Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with you in mind, only to have your agents reject it without showing it to you?

[A] Fonda: I was told afterward that it was submitted to my agents for me and they never gave it to me. When I saw the play, I flipped out. It was the only fan letter I've ever written, to Arthur Hill, who played the part. Later, when they were getting ready to do the movie, there was talk for months about the casting: Bette Davis and I were often mentioned. Then Mike Nichols was assigned to direct it and he chose Elizabeth [Taylor] and Richard [Burton].

[Q] Playboy: Did you like the film?

[A] Fonda: Yes, I did. I frankly didn't think Richard was right for the part. I'm an admirer of Richard's, but it's very difficult for him to be vulnerable. That character is a very vulnerable man.

[Q] Playboy: Vulnerable is one of the adjectives often used to describe you. What would you say your image was?

[A] Fonda: I know people think of me as the typical American: trustworthy, loyal, friendly, full of integrity, and so on. And I know several directors who cast me against type for that reason. Joe Mankiewicz, who put me in There Was a Crooked Man. Quite an interesting part. I played a prison warden in the desert in 1880. There's a jail break and Kirk Douglas and this bunch shoot their way out and Kirk goes to where he hid the gold he'd stolen. It was in a hole and when he goes to reach for it, it's full of rattlesnakes and he gets bit and dies. I find him, throw his dead body over the back of the horse and the bags of gold over the saddle and start back. You assume I'm heading to the prison, but I ride across the Rio Grande into Mexico, which was an O. Henry kind of twist at the end. Joe cast me because I'd be the last person in the world you'd expect to do that.

[Q] Playboy: Sergio Leone also cast you against type in Once Upon a Time ... in the West, in which a rancher, his daughter and two sons are killed at the beginning and the camera slowly comes to the killer--and it's you.

[A] Fonda: That's when I understood why Sergio would cast me in this son-of-a-bitch part--the worst son of a bitch that's ever been. Sergio could hear the audience say, "Jesus Christ, that's Henry Fonda," in shock, and that turned out to be absolutely true. It didn't do well in this country, but it played in Europe and South America for five years.

[Q] Playboy: With all the cowboys you've played, how do you relate to horses?

[A] Fonda: I'm scared to death on a horse. You can't be sure that it isn't going to step into a gopher hole or something and throw you on your ass and break your neck. Never happened to me, but I always felt it was going to.

[Q] Playboy: Although you've been laid up for some months, are you still planning ahead? Looking at scripts?

[A] Fonda: Oh, yeah. I don't look for anything; I read what's submitted to me. So few things are any good at all. I read a lot of shit. Script after script after script, it's just nothing. You don't even want to waste the time reading them.

[Q] Playboy: At least you can always paint. Didn't one of your paintings go for $23,000 at an auction not too long ago?

[A] Fonda: That just staggered me. Shirlee was on the committee for the Neighbors of Watts and she said she'd get me to do a painting. I took these two tomatoes from my garden that weren't quite ripe and put them on the window sill and painted them. Called it Ripening. At the auction, everybody in the world was there. Frank Sinatra donated a gold cigarette box, an antique shop donated a Louis XV settee; somebody else gave a thoroughbred colt worth maybe $6000. My painting was third from the last. There were about 50 objects. When the auction started, shit, the people weren't bidding at all, things were going for nothing. The Louis XV that ought to bring several thousand got a few hundred; the colt got a few hundred. I got madder and madder. When it got to my painting, I was ready to bid and get it back. I thought it might go for $500. The first bid was $11,000! That's when I started to slide under my chair. Shirlee was jumping up and saying, "We're going to get a new schoolhouse!" The bids jumped to about $14,000 very fast. It narrowed down to two people bidding against each other and was knocked down to Norton Simon for $23,000. The next day, he called and talked to Shirlee, just to say how happy they were to own it--and to tell me that you don't ripen tomatoes in the sun. He's the guy who should know--he made his first buck at tomatoes.

[Q] Playboy: You also recently sold a series of four prints that you did. How did you feel about that?

[A] Fonda: I'm still ambivalent. I thought the dealer was out of his mind, he wanted $2000 for the set of four. Insanity! They're not worth it. I can't believe anybody would want one enough to pay that kind of money.

[Q] Playboy: What painters do you most admire?

[A] Fonda: Andrew Wyeth, his dad, his son. I own several Thomas Hart Bentons--an oil in the front hall, a lot of his lithographs and an original sketch from the Grapes of Wrath era.

[Q] Playboy: What about music? Do you listen to much?

[A] Fonda: I used to, but I hate the music that's being written today. I don't listen to rock 'n' roll. I was a jazz nut in the Thirties and Forties. To me, Benny Goodman and those groups--that was music.

[Q] Playboy: Would you say you're guided more by passion or by intellect?

[A] Fonda: By intellect. I don't ... I don't really know. I wanted to say passion, but I think so much about decisions that it's got to be intellect, too.

[Q] Playboy: We haven't touched much on politics. Since you and Jimmy Stewart are best friends, how do you maintain friendship, being on opposite ends of the political tracks?

[A] Fonda: We learned a long time ago that if we were going to remain friends, we didn't talk politics. I first became aware of Jim's reactionary Republicanism when we were at the Stork Club and he started talking about what Roosevelt had done to the railroads--destroyed them. I said Roosevelt wasn't destroying anything, times were changing, we weren't still in an age when railroads were the whole answer; there were airplanes now. It began to be an argument. I realized then that we're not going to understand each other at all and I just stopped and haven't talked politics with him since.

[Q] Playboy: How outspoken were you during the McCarthy era?

[A] Fonda: The McCarthy era was just unbelievable to me. That's when I started to become less friendly with Duke Wayne and Ward Bond, who, I felt, hadn't known how to spell politics until then. They'd never indicated any political leanings, and suddenly these two characters are naming names of Communists in the business, putting them on black lists. I called them both on it, but it made no difference, of course.

[Q] Playboy: Were you ever friendly with them after that?

[A] Fonda: Never with Ward; I never spoke to him again. With Duke, a little warmer. He was a very nice guy and had a sense of humor. He'd always kid me about Jane.

[Q] Playboy: As a man who has played the role of President a few times, how many real ones did you know?

[A] Fonda: I've met Roosevelt, Truman, and I knew John Kennedy intimately. He used to live at the Hotel Carlyle when he was in New York, about two blocks from my house. Afdera met him before I did and had a dinner party and he came. After that, he was at the house quite a lot at parties or just to come over and sit with a drink.

[Q] Playboy: Was that when he was Senator?

[A] Fonda: No, President. We didn't talk politics. We were very social. He was an awful nice guy, easy to know. Funny. I enjoyed being with him.

[Q] Playboy: Did you support Ted when he ran for President?

[A] Fonda: Oh, yeah. But I don't think he'll ever make it. I don't think he should try.

[Q] Playboy: Chappaquiddick?

[A] Fonda: No question. A damn shame, because he's a good man.

[Q] Playboy: What about some of the Republican Presidents?

[A] Fonda: Couldn't stand Eisenhower. Nixon, of course, was just poison to me. I've hated Nixon for 40 years. Started hating him when he whipped Helen Gahagan Douglas, saying she was a Red and a pinko. Such fuckin' lies. I knew her and I've just had nothing but hatred for Nixon ever since and will never understand how the son of a bitch was ever elected.

[Q] Playboy: You think he belongs in jail?

[A] Fonda: Sure.

[Q] Playboy: Were you surprised he was pardoned?

[A] Fonda: Not only surprised, I was shocked. I've never forgiven Ford for that. To think that Nixon was our President! He was such a crook.

[Q] Playboy: Were you even more outraged when you found out the FBI under Nixon was tapping Jane's phone and opening her mail?

[A] Fonda: I couldn't be more outraged. The name Nixon is enough to outrage me.

[Q] Playboy: Briefly, we'd like to ask you your opinions on some current issues, such as abortion and E.R.A.

[A] Fonda: It's ridiculous that it's even a problem. E.R.A. should be taken for granted. Abortion, that's up to the individual.

[Q] Playboy: Gun control?

[A] Fonda: I never will understand why people are against it. It's insanity to me that we don't have gun control.

[Q] Playboy: Pornography?

[A] Fonda: I'm not curious about pornography. I've never gone to a pornographic film. If people want it, give it to them. But I'm ashamed that there is a problem of pornography.

[Q] Playboy: Gay rights?

[A] Fonda: I don't think they ought to be put back in the closet, but there's a certain limit. You can't be a boy scout if you're known to be homosexual, and I agree with that. I'm not sure how I feel about the Army and the Navy. Homosexuals can make damn good teachers.

[Q] Playboy: How concerned are you about Reagan?

[A] Fonda: Reagan is a major concern. I think we're headed for disaster. I'm surprised there isn't more opposition. He upsets me so it's hard to talk about. He's got us on a path now that we're gonna be on for a long time.

[Q] Playboy: Do you know him?

[A] Fonda: Yeah.

[Q] Playboy: Friend?

[A] Fonda: Acquaintance.

[Q] Playboy: Did you think much of him as an actor?

[A] Fonda: No.

[Q] Playboy: Is he much of an actor now?

[A] Fonda: No.

[Q] Playboy: How did he get elected?

[A] Fonda: He's a hell of a speechmaker. He says the things people want to hear. He says them very convincingly and with what sounds like sincerity and he's talking a language that people haven't heard for a long time and it impresses them. I listen to a Reagan speech and want to throw up!

[Q] Playboy: Let's, then, go from bad actors to good. Are there any actors you would have liked to work with?

[A] Fonda: A lot. Brando, Pacino, De Niro.

[Q] Playboy: What is it about them you like?

[A] Fonda: That's asking me to analyze acting, in a way, and I can't do that. They're just exciting to watch.

[Q] Playboy: You can't or you won't?

[A] Fonda: I'm not good at it.

[Q] Playboy: What about actresses? Are there any you regret not having worked with?

[A] Fonda: No, I was very lucky, I worked with most of the exciting actresses around. Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, Olivia de Havilland, Lucille Ball. All of 'em.

[Q] Playboy: Among male actors, you never worked with Laurence Olivier. What do you think of his work?

[A] Fonda: I'm a good friend of Olivier's and I think he's brilliant in his Shakespeare. But he's a mechanical actor. He admits he is. That's the way he works. He says he doesn't work from his heart, he works from his head. But he's awful damn good. He can be just as bad, and so can Brando. I mean, some of the things he's done recently are embarrassing. He wants to make enough money to put his kids through college.

[Q] Playboy: Any other constructive criticism for members of your profession?

[A] Fonda: I've become disappointed in Jack Nicholson recently. He started out to be one of the most exciting young actors we could have. Now, I don't like to hear myself say these things, because they're going to be printed. But I'm not close enough to him to tell him to straighten up.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think he's destroying his career?

[A] Fonda: If he continues like this, he will.

[Q] Playboy: One of the most unpleasant Hollywood stories is about Joan Crawford, whom you knew. Her daughter's book, Mommie Dearest, has been made into a movie. How do you feel about that?

[A] Fonda: I resent the book. I resent the daughter and the publisher and everything about it. I knew Joan during those days. Worked with her and was often at parties at her home, pool parties in the afternoon, when the children were there, and I never saw or heard anything that would give me a clue that the stories were true that the daughter wrote. I think whatever is truth about them has been exaggerated so that it makes her more of a monster than she was.

[Q] Playboy: Do you dislike Hollywood books in general?

[A] Fonda: I hate them. I didn't read it, but I hate Shelley Winters' book from what I've heard. Susan Strasberg's book; I didn't read it, but I'm told about it. I resent the shit out of Garson Kanin and his wife [Ruth Gordon]. They're making capital today and a good living on writing about people they knew and worked with, including Katharine and Spencer. Now, that was a well-known relationship; there wasn't anybody who didn't know about it. But the Kanins wrote about it in detail and they're supposed to have been good friends of Katie's. She'll never forgive them.

[Q] Playboy: What about your own book, which Howard Teichmann wrote under your authorization?

[A] Fonda: They've been asking me for years to write my story and I just was not interested. I couldn't believe anybody cared or would want to read it. I can't believe there's enough in my life that is interesting enough to make a biography. The only reason it was done is that Teichmann said, "It's gonna be written anyway, so you might as well cooperate," and that's why I agreed. I'm going to be curious to read it to find out why the publishers are excited. I'm curious about what I said and what friends said. He'd interview somebody and then call me to corroborate something and there wouldn't be a word of truth in it. It was their memory. It's the old Rashomon.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't the book sell for $1,800,000, the highest price yet paid for an actor's book?

[A] Fonda: And more than that by the time they add London's order and Canada's order, magazine serialization, paperback and everything else.

[Q] Playboy: Well, for a man who's opposed in principle to that sort of thing, you're not doing bad. Do you think you like yourself?

[A] Fonda: If I've made any sense at all in the days I've talked to you, you should understand that I don't like myself. I wish I were somebody better, smarter.

[Q] Playboy: Yet you've played such likable characters.

[A] Fonda: Look at the chances I've had to play and pretend that I'm Clarence Darrow, Mister Roberts, Tom Joad, all those wonderful people. For somebody who doesn't like himself, that's great therapy.

[Q] Playboy: Do you like yourself more now than in the past?

[A] Fonda: No.

[Q] Playboy: What don't you like?

[A] Fonda: I'm not able to be articulate with you and make a lot of good answers to your questions; that's one thing. I'm a lousy interviewee.

[Q] Playboy: Not as bad as you think.

[A] Fonda: Well, I feel I am. I don't feel I have good answers to anything.

[Q] Playboy: Maybe you'll be surprised when you read this.

[A] Fonda: Well, it will be you.

[Q] Playboy: Let's say "us," with the emphasis on you. Brando also didn't think he was as articulate as his interview proved him to be.

[A] Fonda: Well, I'll sure appreciate it if you can do that for me.

[Q] Playboy: George C. Scott has said that the curse of an actor is that he continues to question how important he really is outside his narrow scope----

[A] Fonda: See, that kind of answer is what I mean. I haven't got those good words.

[Q] Playboy: Then let's ask you what worries you most as an actor other than not getting a part--what curse can you think of?

[A] Fonda: I can't think of anything. I'm very proud. I guess because I've done well. I know I have respect and a good reputation. I'm proud of that.

[Q] Playboy: And you'd like to be remembered as....

[A] Fonda: [Pause] As a good actor.

[Q] Playboy: Would you consider yours a happy life, in spite of what you say you feel about yourself?

[A] Fonda: Not counting the tragedies that have happened, most of my life has been happy, yeah. I've been very lucky.

[Q] Playboy: Well, with everything breaking for you at the same time--the book about you, a new movie, this interview--it sure looks like it's going to be a Henry Fonda Christmas.

[A] Fonda: Yeah. [Long pause, slow smile] It is.

"'On Golden Pond' could only be done last summer. If it weren't, who's to know if Katharine Hepburn and I are still alive next summer?"

"I'm sure Jane and Peter wondered where Dad was and why he wasn't home like other dads. I've always regretted it a little bit."

"I'm scared to death on a horse. You can't be sure that it isn't going to step into a gopher hole and throw you on your ass."