PETER FONDA/ STORMY MCDONALD WAS MURDERED
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‘Holden Caulfield at 27’: Esquire’s 1968 Profile of Peter Fonda
If there’s one thing depresses Peter Fonda—makes him so depressed he can’t stand it, for God’s sake!—it’s all those people who drive him out of his bird, you know, make him feel like he’s oozing through the rocks.By Rex ReedPublished: Aug 17, 2019 11:43 AM EDT
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Peter Fonda
Peter Fonda was lying on his back in a bathing suit of old cut-off chinos, out by his swimming pool up on Lime Orchard Road in Beverly Hills. He lives there, more or less a part of the society he’s been rejecting since he was six years old, with his beard and his moustache and his wife Susan who was in bed with the flu the whole afternoon and his two great-looking kids, Bridget and Justin, and three cats named Limpet and Bamboo and Hashish, surrounded by mountains and cut off from everything that even resembles the Establishment. He’s so isolated you can’t even find him on a map of Los Angeles. But he’s there, telling it like he sees it and trying to be his own man in a world that keeps telling him he doesn’t see it straight.
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Lying on his back, talking to a tape recorder, getting it down straight, the sun burning into his skin, with Helena Rubinstein’s Bikini lotion turning his tan to butterscotch and a four-inch scar slashing across his stomach where he once shot himself with a gun when he was ten years old, drinking Carlsberg beer while two Bozak 610 speakers played Vivaldi and Ravi Shankar and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, throwing it up to the hills above the tennis courts. “Peter Fonda. Even reading my name in print drives me around the hill, man. It’s weird. I don’t become Peter Fonda till I go down that road, then the public takes over. Here I’m just me. To anybody who comes up that hill, I’m just ‘Hey man, what’s happening?’ But when I go down that hill, I’m the son of what’s-his-name and the brother of what’s-her-face. I want people to know I’ve got more going on. You’re my proof!” he yelled to his daughter Bridget, almost four, swinging naked on a swing up on the rise above the house.
“Huh?”
“I said you’re my proof.”
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“Huh?”
“She’s gonna drive some guy into the booby hatch.”
There was another girl named Bridget who had committed suicide, the daughter of theatrical producer Leland Hayward and the late Margaret Sullavan, who had been Peter’s father’s first wife. The Haywards’ other daughter, Brooke, is married to Dennis Hopper, one of Peter’s best friends and one of his costars in The Trip.
Esquire Classic
This article appeared in the February 1968 issue of Esquire under the title Holden Caulfield at 27.
“I loved Bridget. I was at a Broadway play, Tenderloin I think, and I went home and my father said sit down and have a drink. He never even talked to me so I couldn’t understand why he wanted me to have a drink, but I sat down and he kept saying, ‘Poor Leland, poor Leland!’ Bridget’s dead from an overdose of pills and I was falling thirteen floors to the ground and all he’s saying is, ‘Poor Leland!’ Adults. All my life I’ve been supposed to respect them and there’s nothing to respect, man. When I got busted for pot, my Aunt Harriet called me from Omaha and told me it was uncool, so I told her it was uncool for her to tell me so. She said it was wrong for me to do it to Susan and the kids. I looked around and saw my old lady sitting there and my kids playing and I didn’t know what she meant. ‘You won’t be able to get Bridget in a good school,’ she said. The last thing I want is to send my kids to school. I want to keep them as far away as possible from organized politics, religion and education. The only thing I owe my daughter is to tell her not to get pregnant.”
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Bridget joined us by the pool, still in the nude. She looks like a baby version of Peter’s sister Jane. Beautiful. Cheeks like ripe nectarines. “You wanna talk into this box, Bridget? When you get to be president of the world, you’ll have to do things like this. You tell this little box here what you think about Daddy.” Bridget wasn’t having any.
The stillness of Peter’s private world was shattered suddenly by the sound of a helicopter. High, high above the hill it came, hovering briefly over the pool and chopping up the Botticelli sky like a dragon breathing down on a meadow of butterflies. He grinned. “They come over the house with telephoto lenses and take pictures to see if I’m smoking pot or taking LSD, and sometimes I take pictures of them taking pictures of me. Hello, fellas, you dirty bastards!”
He talks about LSD like it was a cache of diamonds he suddenly found hidden in a geranium pot. He’s taken eleven trips on acid and he says they saved his life. “A year and a half ago, I had no selfconfidence, no belief. All my life I was getting done in by the crewcut mentality of America that says if you have long hair you’re either queer or a beatnik or on pot. I had a super-ego, an I.Q. of 160 —all the ingredients. But they were so masked by my own viewpoint they couldn’t come through. I was in terrible manic stages, found myself one day in the middle of Europe, man, out of my bird. I was oozing through the rocks. When I took my first acid it jolted me out of that. After LSD, I have seen the worst and I’ve seen the best and I know where I am on this planet.”
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Fonda in a scene from The Trip, 1967.
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His first trip was taken in September, 1965, in the middle of the desert, with two other guys, a St. Bernard named Basil, and a medical supervisor. “We all piled into a station wagon and I remember I had brought some dog food for Basil. I said something to him out loud like, ‘Here, Basil, here’s something to eat,’ because he wasn’t on a trip. He was straight, man, and I knew he was straight. I had been eating an oatmeal cookie that looked like it was alive with worms. You know how the tops of oatmeal cookies look bumpy? Well, under hallucinatory conditions it looked like it was rippling and worms were crawling in and out of it and I popped it in my mouth, man, and I could taste them. I was chewing these worms and swallowing them and oh wow what a feeling and I gave Basil this Gaines burger. Anyway, here was Basil and I said, Oh wow, hey man, you see I didn’t forget about you, man. I’m trying to remember what I said without paraphrasing it. Oh damn.
Anyway, I said in essence that my ego wasn’t so big I had forgotten about him. I had brought him food for his trip because he had come along on our trip. It was comforting for me to know, while I was eating this worm-filled cookie. Do you know what I mean? I’m not sure I’ve said what I meant. It was weird to me under acid to relate to this dog on a certain level. I didn’t know what it meant not to have an ego. I just suddenly knew I didn’t have one at that moment. I was really into the drug by then. Oh man, what a strange trip. The sky at one point looked like a Tiffany lampshade but much prettier. Tiffany could never make one like this. And a plane came through, only I didn’t know it was a plane. I was like watching something else, suddenly I saw the changes coming from above and behind me and I looked up and I saw them as waves coming through the air and hitting and bouncing off and I put my hands up like it was raining and saw these things bouncing off my hands! They were coming from the sky! I didn’t know what it was but it was coming from the sky and finally I looked up and it wasn’t the sun but it was sending all these waves at me. I was seeing the sound! And I focused in on it and it became a plane. Multicolored. Flashing in the sun and the sky in the middle of this Tiffany lampshade.
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Whew. That kind of deep visionary hallucinatory thing went on for about four or five hours. Heavy stuff. Then about three hours of milder stuff and then about four hours of longer periods of changes. Your first changes are multiple and rapid like movie editing—rattattattattt—then they get longer. Every trip is a different trip. Jesus, once the St. Bernard chased a frog or a big kind of horny toad under this bush and I went over to see what he was doing and the thing came out of the hole, only I saw it like a gigantic monster going ROARRR and shooting flames out at me and it really blew my mind, man. We related to each other and were coherent most of the time when we weren’t staring out into space seeing things. You’re seeing different things but you’re on the same trip, you know. I took other trips up in the mountains, once on a beach where I walked on the ocean, once here by my own pool. I think anybody who wants to take a trip should. Knowing there’s a law against it. I don’t mean to sound like I preach sedition or anarchy, but like there’s also a law against oral copulation, man. So there’s this law against LSD, but if you’re serious about your head, man, and want to do some changes for it, there it is.’’
Outrageous? Not to the swingers, the generation Peter speaks to and for. They’re tuning out the sound of Those Who Know because Those Who Know don’t know anything about Moby Grape or the Mugwumps or Lothar and the Hand People or how to dry a crop of dreams in a Laundromat dryer set at “Cotton.” They are fighting yesterday’s problems. They hardly comprehend freak-out, much less the Hare Krishna Chant. So, according to the kids in the acid generation they learn their own way to live in a world inhabited by adults who screwed it up before they got here. And to them Peter Fonda’s life is a perfect example of what they’re fighting to avoid for their own children.
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Peter, Henry, and Jane Fonda in 1963.
He was born in New York City February 23, 1940. His mother was a beautiful socialite-heiress named Frances Seymour Brokaw, the second of Henry Fonda’s five wives. It was the beginning of a childhood that makes the Elsie Dinsmore books look like Jo’s Boys. He flew to California with his father when he was fourteen weeks old and always lived in the background hoopla of the world of being a movie star’s son. “Nobody ever told me anything, man. I remember the time Jane and I went to Jimmy Stewart’s house and he and my father had heartburn and took Tums after dinner and I was so stupid I thought I’d be an adult the day I could take Tums.” He was shuttled around to one school after another. At six he was sent away to a farm school in a canyon. “What kind of parents would send a kid away at six to make his own bed?” When he was seven he moved back to New York, where his father starred in Mister Roberts on Broadway. He went to boarding schools in New York and to Fay School in Southboro, Massachusetts, where he so desperately wanted to belong to someone that he ended up writing love letters for the other boys. After two bad years of Gilbert and Sullivan, he wrote his own play, a take-off on Stalag 17. His mother committed suicide on April 14, 1950, and left him an estate of $60,000. A few months later Peter shot himself through the liver and kidneys with a .22 caliber pistol on the estate of R.H. Kress, the dime-store millionaire. He was rushed to a hospital in Ossining, New York, and given three blood transfusions. His father was off in the Virgin Islands somewhere on a honeymoon trip, this time with his third wife, Susan Blanchard. “Nobody told me the truth about my mother, man. I was ten years old and I didn’t understand. I just knew she was dead and I was all alone. I didn’t find out how my mother died until I was fifteen. I was sitting in this barber’s chair in Rome and I picked up a magazine and read about her doing herself in in an insane asylum. It blew my mind, man. And nobody to this day has ever told me anything.”
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Peter went back to prep school in Connecticut. He organized a drama group and wrote and directed plays and drew cartoons of the faculty members. This caused resentment among the teachers and Peter’s life was made miserable. “I finally left in my third year after I got in a fight with one of the masters. He said I was late for chapel and accused me of being an atheist. I said I was closer to whatever God was than he could ever hope to be. That upset him enough to call my old man a son-of-a-bitch. ‘Anybody who’s been married all those times’—I don’t even know how many times it was at that point—‘has gotta be a son-of-a-bitch.’ He had crossed me on a personal level, man, so I slugged him, knocked him out cold. It was not only in defense of my father, but it was also the first time they—the Establishment—had crossed over that personal line. That was the end of the Establishment for me. I was sixteen when it happened. He was a man and I was a man and he had overstepped his bounds. He held no authority for me. That’s the whole bag, man—who do you respect? The Congressmen and the Senators and the peace officers and the parents? What do they expect, man, once you catch them, once you know they’re not telling the truth? ‘Well, we’ll let that one slide off and we’ll see what else happens?’ That’s the way they live. That’s not the way I live, or the teen-agers who are already finished with their rebellion. The Teen-age Youth Revolution is a fait accompli. The manifesto was written a long time ago. I’ve been told all my life I must accept authority but all the authority I’ve ever seen has been rotten, man.
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Henry Fonda circa 1955.
“I began to really get spooked out about it. I told my father—he was off somewhere getting married again, this time to an Italian baroness, Afdera Fonda—and I went home for the wedding and I told him things were getting rough and he was funny. He said, ‘You want me to take you out of the school?’ And I said no, I’d work it out. I started taking phenobarbital to calm down. You would’ve thought I had malaria. I wasn’t hip to getting high in those days, I was just getting doped up. Then I got in a fight on a bus and they made me the scapegoat and I really flipped out and this guy told the headmaster I needed help. Anyway I said I wanted to leave. I wasn’t kicked out. I just quit. But I did it with a certain amount of whatever dignity I had left at the moment, which was very little. I called Jane at Vassar and told her I needed help and I must’ve been outta my mind because the next day she drove up in a station wagon and found me hiding in the bushes talking to a bunch of dogs. She looked at me and said, ‘Oh wow, I think you’re Holden Caulfield.’ Every young cat who had gone through the same changes, man, Holden Caulfield was their psychodrama. Salinger was the Albee of that time. But it made me mad. I was flipping out of my skull and she thought it was great because it was just like Holden Caulfield.
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“Anyway, my father was off in Europe so she put me on a train to my Aunt Harriet’s in Omaha, Nebraska. What a scene! I landed in Omaha and immediately I was told that, of course, you’ll have to go back to high school. And I said, ‘I’m not going any place, man. You’re crazy.’ You gotta graduate. You gotta be a man. The whole thing about you gotta. They didn’t believe anything I told them so they just assumed I had been kicked out of school. Nobody called the headmaster or anything. I was lost. My mother had been in a mental institution and my aunt was afraid I would end up in one too. I could’ve become a professional killer or a robber or anything at that point. I was that close to flipping out to the other side. But I agreed finally to go out to the University of Omaha to take an achievement test so at least they’d know where I was. I took every kind of test and interview you can imagine. Some of them were so stupid and inane I started putting on the people who were giving them. I blew my cookie. The first thing I was asked to define was the word puddle. Click went the stopwatch. I laughed and got up and walked out of the room. The second thing they asked me to define was cat. Click went the stopwatch. I said you’re all insane, man, what do you mean define cat. So they gave me two boxes. One had a pack of cards and the other had some categories. Married . . . I don’t know. Divorced . . . I don’t know. I was also dead on their test. There were three no’s, six yeses and forty-seven I-don’t-knows. That’s where I was. I was honest. Then my father flew in from France and was sitting on the couch in my aunt’s house and this guy told him I had an intelligence quotient of 160 and should be a sophomore in college and he yelled, ‘WHAT?’ If he’d said I should be a star quarterback he probably would’ve been pleased. Now he finds out something cool is going on with his son—his kid had a brain. He couldn’t just accept it, there had to be a punishment. I had to get my high-school diploma first, so since the only private school in Omaha was a girls’ school I ended up attending college and graduating from an all-girls’ high school at the same time.”
“I failed because she didn’t like what I said—that was college. They sock it to you, baby.”
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College turned out to be as sterile for Peter’s kind of brain as all the other fiasco schools had been. “As a freshman I took the same program of teaching that was given to me when I was twelve, in grade school. I was bored out of my bloody mind sitting there. They were talking about art when just the summer before I had met Picasso. I already knew what Hemingway was all about, man, I had run into some of these cats. I had listened to Faulkner talk the way some people listen to football games on the radio. They called Degas a finger-painter, man. Then this chick teacher asked me to do a paper on Montaigne.” Peter said the word as if he had just bitten down on some green insect. “He invented the essay form. I had no use for him. The essay is non-creative. Everything I’d read of his up to that point had been plagiarized, so I put him down in five hundred words and I was given a grade of F. I read the paper over and discovered I had one misspelled word and one grammatical structural mistake. I went to the head of the English department and raised hell. ‘How can you mark me down just because you don’t agree?’ This chick teacher thought he was a bloody genius and I didn’t. I don’t care if it’s a bloody college or prison ward or the Superior Court of Los Angeles. I have to tell it like it is, man. It’s the only way to be. My way of telling it was to put my thing down on paper. I was bored by it, she was boring, the class bored me, I was only fulfilling my obligation. I failed because she didn’t like what I said—that was college. They sock it to you, baby.”
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Peter Fonda at age 21 in 1961.
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But there he was, getting lectures about being an adult from the adults, locked away in Omaha, living the kind of life his father wanted him to live because that’s what had been expected of him by his father, and Peter was more confused than ever. “I had been on a shrinker’s couch when I was eleven, man, and I’d been drinking five quarts of wine a day in Rome when I was fifteen, and I’d been picked up by this twenty-eight-year-old woman who was married to a serviceman in Rome and they had picked me up in front of St. Peter’s and taken me home and balled me and it blew my life out when I was fifteen and I was expected to come home and date these nice girls in Omaha. And my father’s off in the woods someplace and even when he’s sitting in the same room with me he doesn’t know what to say and my hair’s cut short the way he wants it and my aunt keeps telling me I should take out this chick whose father is a member of the local establishment or something and she’s a nice girl, right? Well, the only chick I ever knocked up was this chick and I got it on the first date and I stayed out until five in the morning and when I got home it was all right with my aunt because it had been this chick, and here I’m going to have to pay $500 to send her to Puerto Rico and I haven’t got the bread. So I sold a Christmas present, a shotgun or something I didn’t want, and I sold it. I bought my freedom from her.”
He bought his own freedom too. He took $300 he had saved and at the end of his third year he climbed into an old Ford and headed for a summer-stock company in Fishkill, New York, where he would take his clothes to the laundromat and hide behind the drier naked and drink beer while they washed. He also painted sets, ushered, did walk-ons and worked the lights. He was learning. He went to New York and got a part in Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole, a play which won him the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for promising actor. Three days later he married Susan Brewer, stepdaughter of Howard Hughes’ former assistant, Noah Dietrich. The play closed after two and a half months and Peter went back to Hollywood for the first time in years. On his own terms this time. He was tested for the part of President Kennedy in PT-109 but his first film turned out to be Tammy and the Doctor, which he now calls Tammy and the Schmuckface. He got $15,000 for it. “I saw it and had to be hospitalized for a week and a half. I’m just kidding. I only vomited.” He bought a car and went to London to do an anti-war film, The Victors, which was a disaster. Then he did Lilith for Robert Rossen and although it was his best film, his part was heavily cut. He didn’t get along with Warren Beatty and he received practically no direction from Rossen. His fourth film, The Young Lovers, was another flop.
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Peter went into a depression. His mind was full of things he wanted to say and people were accepting him as an adult, but he still wasn’t pleased with his creative output. So he sank deeper within himself and withdrew from the kind of society that approves of making movies for money even if they don’t say anything. His troubles began all over again.
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Fonda and his wife Susan at a party for Yves Saint Laurent in 1965.
On February 3, 1965, he was in Tucson when his best friend, Eugene (Stormy) McDonald, heir to the $30,000,000 Zenith Radio fortune, was found shot to death and his wrists slashed. A coroner’s jury decided that since 32.4 grams of marijuana (enough for fifty cigarettes) were found in the dead man’s apartment, Peter should be given a lie-detector test to see if he had any criminal knowledge of the death. Although it was finally decided that the death may have been a “homicide in the presence of person or persons unknown,” Peter got off with nothing more than some pretty messy headlines. The death of Stormy, who had been his best friend since their college days in Omaha, left him visibly shaken. “There’s never a day that I don’t think about my best friend putting a bullet in his head. There’s hardly a day I don’t think about my mother cutting her throat. There’s hardly a day that I don’t realize this girl whom I was in love with, and who was almost like my sister, took pills and did herself in. And all the other people I knew who tried to do themselves in. I have no sympathy anymore. Compassion. But no sympathy.”
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The most bizarre stage in the life-span of Peter the Rebel was just beginning. He became Peter the Kook. He wore funky tinted shades and let his hair grow until it curled around his chin. He took to wearing cowboy boots and crash helmets, and Navy commander hats with tuxedos, and living on raw eggs, bananas, milk and Bosco chopped up in a blender.
Peter was still fighting the world with proud tears in his eyes behind the motorcycle goggles.
The only company in Hollywood willing to take a chance on him at this point was American International Pictures, an organization which went into business fifteen years ago with something called Fast and Furious and The Beast With 1,000,000 Eyes and had worked all the way up to How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. The Wild Angels was made for peanuts. Peter got $10,000. The film has grossed about $10,000,000 and has turned Hank’s Bad Boy into an underground star with the number-one best-selling poster (showing him with a motorcycle between his legs) prominently displayed in the arty paperback-book galleries. Peter Fonda, according to the grass-roots underground, is the whole shirt. Zero cool.
All of which leads to Peter Fonda as he is today: lying beside his pool, making a 45-r.p.m. record of Donovan’s Catch the Wind and accompanying himself on a twelve-string Guild acoustical guitar, watching a group of guys and their bird riding up the driveway on motorcycles. “Hey, I’m doing an interview, man, come back later.” Talking about everything. Like the time he was busted for smoking pot last winter. “I got a call in the middle of the night from this chick who said, ‘Your friend’s been busted,’ so I called a lawyer for my friend and about a day and a half later I got a call from my lawyer saying, ‘You’re gonna be busted!’ and what it amounted to was that this house had been raided and the cops said pot was growing in the backyard. They found out I was part of it in that I was the guy’s employer—he was like a secretary to me at the time, he was my personal assistant on Wild Angels—and I had left a guitar case in the house with my name on it. About this time American International was putting out all this promotion material calling me a symbol of the younger generation or something and the cops believed it. They thought I was the leader of a dope ring. So it was released to the papers that they had busted my house, man. I wasn’t even in town, man. I got hauled into Superior Court in Los Angeles, no joke. I had to go in front of a jury on a felony charge— possession of eight pounds of marijuana. I got on the stand and I admitted I’d been to this guy’s house, but not more than a few hours. ‘Well, Mr. Fonda, what was going on? What did you see them do?’ ‘Well, I didn’t pay any attention—It was none of my business.’ I took an oath that I’d tell the truth and that was the truth. I’m working on a formula to blow up the district attorney’s office.”
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” I took an oath that I’d tell the truth and that was the truth.”
He got off after Henry Fonda flew in from Arizona with a beard he grew for a movie Western and testified in Peter’s defense. “I wore my hair long, I wore my double-breasted suits. I smiled at everybody. I wore my funky shades. Everything my lawyer told me not to do. I knew I wasn’t guilty, but all of my principles were at stake. The jury was instructed that if I was found guilty it would have to be beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty. I think those words were repeated at least one hundred and fifteen times. ‘Remember ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it must be proved beyond all reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty.’ The prosecuting attorney said in his summation that the jury shouldn’t be led astray by the appearance of the young defendant. ‘You must think about him just as though he was a Mexican.’ This was downtown Los Angeles, which is made up of Mexicans. Mexican built. They were here before we got there and here was this guy telling them to treat me just like I was a Mexican. I nearly fell out of my chair. Two women on the jury voted against me. I was not acquitted, because on a felony charge you have to have a complete, unanimous vote. But ten-to-two to acquit is pretty heavy, so they dropped the charges. They figured they were doing me a favor, so I spoke right out and said: ‘On the contrary. My sister’s willing to back me for another trial. If you want to play, I can play. And this one I’ll really win because I know what mistakes I made last time.’ I really dig my sister. Probably a great deal more than she digs me and she digs me. I dig my father, too. I have a great deal of compassion for him, too. I wish he could open his eyes and dig me.”
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He was arrested again on November 27, 1966, in front of the Fifth Estate coffeehouse on Sunset Strip along with a hundred other hippies who were accused of loitering. He was jailed, but not booked, and at three-forty-five a.m. he was released after his press agent proved he had been on the scene to shoot a documentary film on teen-agers. The film never appeared, but Peter did shock everybody by turning out The Trip, a bizarre full-color curio directed by Roger Corman, a big underground favorite with the Positif crowd in Paris. Corman had directed Wild Angels and American International was hip to making some more of the kind of money that film grossed. So Corman’s camera and Peter’s knowledge of LSD was certain to be a yeasty combination. They opened the movie and passed out kaleidoscopes to the square critics with a gimmicky come-on: “LISTEN TO THE SOUND OF LOVE . . . FEEL PURPLE . . . TASTE GREEN . . . TOUCH THE SCREAM THAT CRAWLS UP THE WALL. . . .” The critics weren’t amused. Except for the far-out critics who dig Jerry Lewis movies, it got rotten notices. But Peter feels proud of it.
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“I didn’t do it for money, man. If I wanted to make money I’d discover a way to make food out of the ocean and make a billion dollars because years from now the world is going to be starving and they’ll turn to the ocean for sustenance. The money I have doesn’t come from movies, man. Movies didn’t pay for all this. I got involved in the beginning because the script I read was so beautiful, so incredibly honest—wow!—what an honest thing, that I decided to dedicate myself to making sure it was done right, that I went against the advice of everybody else—my agents, my business managers, all the people I paid money to for advice—heads of the industry and so on. Because I had been involved in the drug scene, they thought coming out and doing a drug film was a very stupid move for me and I could see their point and all that. But I kept telling myself, man, you gotta do this movie! You just gotta do it! This’ll be the first time you can make a movie and won’t have to compromise once! It’s got LSD in it and that’s all it needs. I kept telling Corman, ‘You’re not gonna lose any money, man.’ You can only make something good if you don’t have to worry about making money. The ones who won’t go see it because it’s an A.I.P. dope film will have to see it because it’s a great movie. And if you make an exploitation film, you’re still gonna make money. I said this to Corman in person, face to face, close enough in person, meaning like personally, personably, in tune with him. So I’m not copping out. He knew, or he pretended to know, he would never have to compromise. But he compromised. It isn’t important how much because The Trip as it stands is still an incredible American movie. Corman had to go to Europe to make some racing-car movie with Fabian or Frankie Avalon or somebody before the final editing and scoring was finished. The music wasn’t even in yet. All the stuff we shot, it happened, everything went down as it did because Dennis Hopper and I went out and shot it one weekend. All the stuff in the desert. Corman let me shoot it. I told him I had the equipment, but I didn’t, man. I had to go out and rent it. Dennis directed and I ran.” (The desert scenes, which Fonda and Hopper had asked Corman’s permission to shoot, took about a minute of the entire footage.)
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Fonda (left) and Dennis Hopper in a scene from The Trip.
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“Not while on a trip, though.”
“I took the trip straight. First of all, if I took acid for a camera I’d look at the camera and the people around me and I’d say, ‘You dumb bastards’ and walk out the door or something. I’m not gonna play that game on acid, man. No, I did it straight because I wranted to see if I knew how to act. It was a chance, man. The running sequences were shot by a guy in a wheelchair and another guy running behind with two sun guns, man. It was underground movie time, man. That’s the wray to make a film. I waited a long time before I even signed the contracts to make sure I got everything I could get. Like music. They had a contract to spend $3,000 for music. Three thousand bucks! I finally told them I would give them the music for that price and I would take care of getting it done. So I ended up paying my own bread to get the music produced, it cost me $7,500, which I didn’t have. Because they didn’t pay me that much to do the flick. But I got a percentage.” [Corman denies Fonda’s version of his contributions to the film.] “They made millions on The Wild Angels. And they worked me overtime, too many days, and they didn’t pay me for it; they gave me about a thousand dollars’ worth of camera equipment, instead, enough to build my own darkroom with. But The Trip is gonna make so much bread, man— wowwww! Can you imagine what’s gonna happen like in Texas, man, when those kids in that drive-in get to that first nude love scene, man? The naked scenes were my idea. Even my Aunt Harriet wants to see it. ‘You’ve heard so much about it, now SEE the pill going down!’ See, there’s this boat sixty-five feet long and it’s gonna cost me a quarter of a million bucks and in order to pay that I gotta make three million. Now I figure five percent of The Trip means I get $50,000 for every million they make in profit. I think they are already making a profit. I’m not allowed to say how much it cost to make,” he yells into the mike, “but that’s CENSORSHIP and not believing in CENSORSHIP . . . it only cost around $450,000 to make.
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“I like movies like that, without all the big-studio crap. The Wild Angels was a wild film. I did all my own stunts, my own motorcycle riding. Everybody did everything, we worked for almost nothing, we got our part all done in seventeen days. Some of the cops were played by the Hell’s Angels. They’re as bourgeois as everybody else, they’ve got rules and regulations they live by. I walked in and they weren’t sure if I was gonna be right for the part, man, because I mean look at me, I don’t look like a Hell’s Angels, man. But I knew what puts them up tight better than the Angels do and I had a good reason for being there because it was an anti-Establishment film. It didn’t prettify anything. It was new. So people say, ‘Is that your criteria? Is that what makes it good, because it’s new?’ First of all, people like that are bound to be reactionary anyway. There are always new Fords every year and I don’t own any Fords. There are always new rifles. New plants. Not demolition plants, but growing green plants. Grass. Get it? Grass?” He makes smoking gestures. “No, I mean this kind of newness. Films should be open to interpretation. I want to make the audience participate, not by vocally yelling yes and no, booing or hissing in a melodrama. That’s thirdperson participation. That’s titillation. ‘No, no, Doris, don’t pick up the phone,’ you say to Doris Day, who’s about to pick up the phone to get a divorce from Rod Taylor, ‘Rod’s changed his mind!’ ‘It’s all over, don’t do it,’ says you, sitting in your third-person seat. In The Trip, man, you never have a chance to. First of all, the music doesn’t give you a cue to what’s coming on, nobody looks to the door because it’s suddenly opening, it’s zing! you’re going someplace else. You gotta watch everything. Even the corn is reprised so it makes cinematic sense, not just bucolic crap. That kind of participation, man, brings an audience in. They dig it.”
American International Pictures//Getty Images
Peter Fonda and Salli Sachse in a scene from The Trip.
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Right now he’s making his own movie about the Beverly Hills meter maids who ride along on their motorcycles marking your tires with chalk so the cops can give out tickets. “It’s called Lovely Rita Meta Maid. The Beatles wrote the song and I’m gonna do a movie with that as its theme and change pictures on the screen in a rhythmic pattern to that music and subliminally flashed in will be pictures of chicks making cats with gun belts on and boots on and handcuffs and nightsticks, beating people while they’re getting made and stuff. Only Rita will never be shown to anybody, man, unless I show it on a pretty wild circuit, because nobody will want to see that. I mean they’ll want to see it, but their cops won’t want to see it and the cops decide what everybody else is gonna see. Get that, Everybody Else? Does that make ya mad, Everybody Else? Does that make ya sad, Everybody Else? Does that make ya glad?
“And then there’s also the possibility of doing something with my sister. Listen, Jane and me in a film, right? Directed by Vadim, right? Who’s got one of the greatest love cameras I’ve ever seen, a phallus! Jane and I as brother and sister who make nude pornographic movies directed by her husband, who is a porny moviemaker.”
The motorcycle gang was roaring up the hill again. “Hey, the interview’s still on, man!” yelled Peter. They left, frowning. “They don’t understand I’m gonna be president in five years,” he said, grinning like a Mongol slave trader.
There was an enormous splash. We looked around and saw a small brown lump drifting toward the bottom of the twenty-foot end of the pool. “My God, it’s the baby!” Justin, just a year old, had fallen in. Peter leaped into the water and dragged the struggling baby up by its feet. He jangled him up and down in a few spasmodic jerks and the water came pouring out of Justin’s lungs as he wailed his head off. “That’ll teach him not to crawl around the pool,” said Peter, putting the baby down on the hot concrete. “I won’t always be around.
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Silver Screen Collection//Getty Images
Fona with Nancy Sinatra in The Wild Angels.
“I’m nude in front of my wife and kids all the time. We swim out here in the raw. If you can become that intimate, that honest, without having moral hang-ups or copping out and going into a nudist colony, you’re healthy. That’s like smoking behind the barn or grooving in the back seat of a car. Here in California at the Los Angeles County Art Museum there was an art exhibit of Ed Kienholz’s sculpture, Backseat Dodge ’38, showing two people grooving in the backseat of a car. The parts of the car were assembled and the door was open so you could see in and it was a work of art for the comment it made on society. Two of the county supervisors objected to it and the museum established a policy that this particular exhibit would not be viewed by anyone under eighteen unless accompanied by an adult. I laughed because the only people I know who make it in backseats of cars are under eighteen because their parents won’t let them inside the house. It shows how weird people’s minds are. It shows that their kids, if they wanted to make it, would have to make it in the backseat of a car someplace instead of being able to groove with success on a bed. That’s the American viewpoint. Now if you are able to groove where you want to groove you can take your clothes off and go swimming and not get embarrassed about it in front of a whole mess of people you don’t even know and pull it straight without any hang-ups in your own mind. But then you are immediately a different band from society. You stand alone. Law and order says you can’t have that kind of responsibility of thinking for yourself. Moral laws are one way to make it easier to keep whole masses of people in check, because if society doesn’t become too liberal it’s easier to control.
“I’m called a very naïve person for thinking that way. I’m called an idealist, a dreamer, a rationalist, every kind of goddam name you can think of. I think I’m very non-naïve. I look at the people who believe in society and I consider them naïve. I could survive on this planet if it all went tomorrow. Most of those people who want to put me down in the press, those who pass moral judgment on me, put me in jail, they’d be jumping out of windows because their gig got done in—either through a social revolution or a Chinese bomb. I’ll be out there making fishhooks out of bones because I know how to, and I didn’t take an Eagle Scout test to do it. Or I can field-dress a deer. When I was five years old I had my first thoughts about death. There was a war on. I saw life as one whole war with everybody dead and I had nightmares. When I was nine and ten, I was going through emotional changes that would send me to the bathroom, racked with pain. They always wanted to take my temperature, and it was subnormal because my blood pressure, my blood sugar, was way, way down. But of course they never bothered to find out about that. I didn’t have any stomachaches or pains or sicknesses. But I couldn’t function because I was in such pain in my head. I was a manic-depressive then. At nine. And they’d say I was just trying to stay out of school. They did me in, man, and I couldn’t tell them anything because I had no vocabulary. I was just a nine-yearold freak. I always thought about suicide. I’ve popped pills, I’ve taken a quart of whiskey and drank it down like water, holding my nose. I drove a car into a bridge at over a hundred miles an hour.
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“Now I don’t think I’ll kill myself. Not since I took LSD. I found me on LSD and my eleven sessions achieved what it takes others five days a week for five years on a shrinker’s couch to accomplish. It was cheaper. I found out platinum spoons or plastic spoons—they’re all spoons, man. They all feed you. And to think ‘I’m better than you’ is the biggest fallacy I know. Everybody else used to think that, so I did too. They were convinced that because I was Henry Fonda’s son that something else was son was going on in my life and everybody had to suck up to me or put me down because of it, one way or the other. It could never be anything else but that and it blew my mind because being Henry Fonda’s son—what did that mean? I talk to him now. I say, ‘I love you,’ you know, like I could never love him before. But now I know that all in all he saved me. The fact that we had to spend a Christmas in Kansas and a Christmas in Detroit and a Christmas in a hotel room in Milwaukee, the fact that I was one summer here and one summer there and all over the bloody world —I discovered what Christmas was all about, what the word family meant.
“I consider myself part of the universe. The universe is a religion. Man is a religion. It’s all heaven, it’s all hell. Everything is everything. Death is just a change.”
“One of the first things I learned was that everybody has to find out what’s going on out there, because they don’t know what’s going on in here. I point to myself when I say that. I’m not original, Christ said the same thing. People can’t know what’s in front of them if they don’t know where they’ve been. Christ said, ‘If you see what’s in front of you, all the rest will be revealed unto you.’ ”
“Do you consider yourself religious?” I asked.
“No, I consider myself part of the universe. The universe is a religion. Man is a religion. It’s all heaven, it’s all hell. Everything is everything. Death is just a change.”
And that’s where Peter Fonda is now. He’s living it out a day at a time. “I have to be free in my head,” he says, “I cannot be free in society.”
There seemed only one thing left to ask: “Are you happy now?” But Peter had done a perfect swan dive back into the pool and he never heard the question.
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