The Jane Fonda performances Henry Fonda hated: “He would tell other people how proud he was”
Being brought up in Hollywood can be a double-edged sword for any child. As much as people might like the idea of seeing how the other half lives and having parents who are superstars, the amount of attention placed on you before you’re even out of diapers is bound to overstay its welcome after a few years. Even when you have a father as ingrained in show business as Henry Fonda was, it was hard to shake the concerns he had for his daughter Jane Fonda, deciding to join him in the industry.
Then again, looking at Henry’s era of showbiz compared to Jane’s is like night and day. Henry was brought up in the era of Broadway stars, and even when he was performing some of the greatest dramas ever conceived like 12 Angry Men, it still felt like he was trying to keep everything lighthearted whenever he got in front of the screen.
Around the time that Jane saw her first movie roles, though, times had changed a lot since My Darling Clementine. This was the era of free love and the beginnings of the hippie movement, and when Barbarella debuted in 1968, Jane quickly became the sex symbol for the next generation of teenagers. And Henry was less than thrilled.
When talking about her relationship with her father with Joan Baez, Jane mentioned that he was never too complimentary when it came to her more racy films, saying, “Dad occasionally told me that he was proud of me, but when he would have an interview, he would tell other people how proud he was. But if I did a performance that was in any way sexual, he hated it.”
Being proud of the work is one thing, but it’s not hard to see why Henry would be upset. No matter how many times people see her as a sexual being, she was always going to be that little girl that he raised back in the 1940s, so to see audiences becoming more and more infatuated with her had to be more than a little bit uncomfortable.
But that might have more to do with the changing times than just a teenage kid rebelling against her parents. After all, she had debuted right as the Summer of Love was getting underway, so the idea of free love was opening people’s eyes to what boundaries could be pushed on the big screen and beyond.
And it’s not like Peter Fonda was necessarily a choir boy by comparison. Suppose Jane was being looked at as a sex symbol. In that case, you can imagine what the family dinners must have been like when they had to deal with Peter playing a rough-and-tumble biker who indulged in recreational drug use and had even dropped acid with The Beatles in the mid-1960s.
Then again, you can’t help but think that part of Jane’s filmography choices were a way for her to speak her mind in a way that her father would never let her. As evidenced by her various political causes, she was never afraid to speak her mind, so taking on more (comparatively) outrageous roles might have been her way of making up for having to keep things fairly clean throughout her home life.
No parent can keep their child from growing up, and there’s a good chance that the moment that films like Barbarella came out, Henry knew that he wasn’t just looking at his child trying her hand at acting. This was a true professional who was going to make a name for herself no matter what kind of familial concerns stood in her way.
