Read Online My Life So Far by Jane Fonda - Free Book Online

four years were spent living in a spacious house in California, sandwiched between Beverly Hills and the coastal city of Santa Monica. Margaret O’Brien lived down the street in a big white plantation-style house. Producer Dore Schary, whose two daughters, Jody and Jill, would become schoolmates, lived around the corner. Mother had purchased a home for Grandma Seymour a few doors down from ours.

 

     
    This is how Dad looked when he’d take me into the pool.
    (John Swope, Courtesy the John Swope Trust)
     

 
    Today, the house we lived in belongs to actor/director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle. In the nineties, with my third husband, Ted Turner, I attended one of their Oscar-viewing parties in a new wing of the house that was the projection room. During a break in the ceremonies, I got Rob Reiner’s permission to wander around the house, seeing how much of it I could remember. I walked into the first-floor master bedroom. I knew exactly where I was because the nicest memories I have of being with my mother took place right there at around age four. She would sometimes take me into her bed in the mornings and read me Grimms’ Fairy Tales and the Oz stories.
    Mother spent a lot of time in bed even then, and she had one of those rolling hospital tables that would swing over the bed, tilt to hold reading material, and flatten to receive a breakfast tray. She always had beautiful lacy bed jackets and peignoirs, and soft, silky sheets. Her bed was a nice place to be, and by then I guess I had forgiven her for preferring my brother. The fairy tales and children’s poems she read were illustrated by Maxfield Parrish: colored plates of princesses, sorcerers, fairies, and knights brandishing swords to slay fire-breathing dragons. There was a dreamy, haunting quality about the illustrations, equally romantic and frightening. Even though the illustrated plates appeared only once every chapter, the images were so evocative that they would draw me into their dark, languorous world. Mother’s voice would disappear and I would
become
the story, like a movie inside my head.
    Why, I wonder, have these stories, filled with sadness, loss, and danger, lasted through the ages? Why did the writers put in things that can frighten children? But if I put myself back then, back into my four-year-old mind, I think that I, like all children, already had an existential understanding that life is dangerous and there is sadness—and rather than lying about these realities, these stories and images externalize them so that we can see and acknowledge them but not die from them.
    Starting in the final years of the thirties, right at the end of our block lived the Hayward family. What was rather extraordinary about this was that Mrs. Hayward was none other than Margaret Sullavan, my father’s first wife—the woman who had broken his heart. Mr. Hayward was Leland, my father’s agent. The Haywards had three children, Brooke, Bridget, and Bill. By now, Sullavan had become a big star of both stage and screen, but her role as mother to her three children took precedence. Leland’s client list included not just my father but every major star in Hollywood: Greta Garbo, Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers—and on it went. Inevitably, the Hayward kids were over at our place or we were over at theirs. But during all those years my parents were invited only
once
to the Haywards’ for a dinner party, an invitation my mother never reciprocated. I intuited that something in Dad became more alive when Sullavan was around, and if
I
picked it up, Mother must have.
    I have a vivid image of Margaret Sullavan, from the way she looked to the deep, husky quality of her voice. But what impressed me most about her was how athletic and tomboyish she was. Dad had taught her how to walk on her hands during their courtship, and she could still suddenly turn herself upside down—and there she’d be, walking along on her hands. At the