BRIDGES, FONDA: ON FATHERS AND FILMS

Thin and fit, her face glowing pink, a quite relaxed Jane Fonda kicked off her heels, smoothly tucked her legs under a russet-suede skirt and settled cozily into a 90-minute chat with co-star Jeff Bridges. Their current movie, “The Morning After,” a romance thriller about a down-and-out drunk Los Angeles actress and a down-home disabled ex-cop from Bakersfield--what Fonda touts as a “movie-movie, not a message movie”--opens Christmas Day.

As scions of two Hollywood families, Lloyd Bridges’ younger son and Henry Fonda’s daughter did not know each growing up. Actually, by the time Jeff was born, the Fondas had already moved back East. They first met eight years ago at Peter Fonda’s ranch in Montana where Bridges has a vacation house.

Fonda and Bridges--she turned 49 Sunday; he’s 37--behaved like a pair of old shoes together. They talked about love and fear and ambition and about coming relatively late, emotionally, to acting. They giggled when she noted, “We both tend to be performers who can make people we work with look good. . . . Isn’t that a terrible thing to say?” “Yeah,” he echoed, “terrible.”

Bridges, who is married with three young daughters, recalled that his father, while doing the ‘50s television series “Sea Hunt,” used to bring him, as a grade-schooler, up to his bedroom to talk about acting. Jeff also played in the series. “My Dad taught me all the basics about being an actor, how important it was to feel each time like it was the first time, how important listening to the other person was, and having your lines down.”

And Fonda noted softly, a bit wistfully, that her father didn’t do that. “I was not encouraged by my father. . . . He never, you know, he never, like the stuff you described, he never did that. . . . He never wanted me to be an actress.”

However, she did offer that her father suggested she take the ingenue role when he starred in “The Male Animal,” the summer she was 18 in Hyannisport. “He was doing Sidney’s movie ‘Twelve Angry Men’ (Sidney Lumet, also director of “The Morning After”).

At 17 she had acted with her father in “The Country Girl” at the Playhouse in Omaha. “That’s where he started. He always said I was good, but I never really believed him. It was like your father says it.”

Fonda was surprised to hear that it was not until Jeff played in the movie version of “The Iceman Cometh” with Robert Ryan in 1973 that he considered himself an actor rather than thinking of himself as someone merely “getting a foot in the door because of the family name.” Bridges saw Ryan rehearsing with his two hands pressed flat on a table, and after Ryan left, “I saw two big wet prints on that table. He was as nervous as I was.”

“It’s weird,” Fonda said. “By the time you did ‘The Last Picture Show’ (1971) . . . you did all those films, some of which were very good, and you hadn’t said, ‘I am an actor? ‘ “

“I always left myself an out,” replied Bridges, who received his first Oscar nomination as a supporting actor for “Last Picture Show.” (He also received a best-supporting actor nomination for “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” and a best-actor nomination for “Starman.”)

Fonda wondered whether Bridges was “nervous about competing with your father?”

“And my brother (Beau) too,” Bridges said. “I haven’t really figured it out completely. I don’t like to compete, and I’m not sure that that’s because I don’t want to lose so bad that I don’t want to even play the game.” He paused: “But now I’m in the game.”

“Like Jeff, I was a long time coming to it,” Fonda said. “I tried to avoid it like crazy. I didn’t like Hollywood and I didn’t like the life. I was basically, absolutely scared to death that I would fail.”

Still she became a summer apprentice at Hyannisport. “That was my idea. It was a little acting class where you painted scenery, fell in love with stage managers, that kind of thing. It was fun.” Yet not until several years later, while studying at the Actors Studio in New York did she believe she was an actress. She was doing “a sense memory” as an exercise, and Lee Strasberg told her she was good.

And when did she know her father respected her work? “The first time I was really and truly conscious of it was when I asked him about it, and it was in ‘Klute’ (1970). And in ‘Coming Home’ (1978)--he was very ill at that time. The one that he would have loved the most, which he didn’t live to see, was ‘The Dollmaker’ (1984) because it was his kind of people. He would have loved the woman as much as I did. I mean, the whole time I made it, I would open my mouth, and I would hear his voice coming out my mouth.”

Bridges and Fonda (her two best-actress Oscars were for “Klute” and “Coming Home”; she got an Emmy for “Dollmaker”) live a few blocks from each other in Santa Monica. “I walk past his house every morning. Every morning at 6 o’clock. I have a whole route. “

About the only touch of Hollywood Fonda can recall about growing up is going to “Joan Crawford’s house for little Christina’s birthday parties, and that is about as Hollywood as you can get, with rented circuses and Ferris wheels.”

Fonda was raised “on a farm right up in the hills about a canyon over from Mount St. Mary’s, with coyotes and mountain lions. . . . It was wild.” Jane and her younger brother Peter moved with their parents to Greenwich, Conn., in 1948. Henry Fonda, home from World War II, was pursuing his career on Broadway. It was a tragic time for the Fondas. When Jane was 12 and Peter 10, their mother committed suicide, a matter Fonda quickly shuts the door on.

“Jane was my big attraction,”doing “Morning After,” Bridges noted. “And Sidney (Lumet). I also liked dealing with the subject of prejudice. I hadn’t done it to that degree in movies. We tend to put ourselves and others into cubbyholes. And he’s (his character) a survivor.”

“I had never played a drunk,” Fonda began. “I didn’t think I could and I wanted the challenge. You know there comes a point after a certain amount of time in the business where it’s very difficult to find a part that takes you to an emotional place where you’ve never been before. You find yourself repeating colors. . . .

“Take fear. No two people are going to feel or express fear the same,” she said. “Whether as an actor you’re capable of finding all the myriad ways of expressing fear. ‘Julia,’ that was a lot about fear and overcoming fear. Certain kinds of anguish, of falling in love, of vulnerability, and of anger, you find you’ve done three or four times.”

Fonda added that while “Morning After” is not even a movie about alcoholism, it does show “two people, a sober alcoholic and one who isn’t, and it shows complexity and hope.

“I don’t like to go to movies, and I don’t like to make movies that don’t have happy endings, and I don’t mean films should be escapist. . . . Tom (Assemblyman Hayden, her husband) is such a romantic. He saw the ending and thought it was a movie classic.”

Then, laughing, she described a kind of preparation for her role with a half-bottle of vodka. “It was the Super Bowl. ‘Agnes of God’ had just wrapped. I was alone in Canada. You can get away with a lot in the guise of research. . . . It was essentially very boring. When you’re drunk, you don’t do anything. Can you imagine,” she said, nudging Bridges, “how stupid, getting drunk, then sort of looking at yourself in the mirror and just waiting?”

When Bridges noted he was surprised at how “really scared” Fonda was about getting her scenes right, she reflected: “It’s back to that thing about stereotypes. In spite of ourselves, we tend to buy into our preconceptions about people. Like the preconception of me is that I’m this Totally Together, Absolutely No Feeling, No Vulnerability, with everything that comes along with that, including humorless.”

When on the subject of careers, Fonda said, “I can’t think of any regrets,” Bridges chimed in: “They’re kind of a learning experience.”

Doesn’t Fonda regret her role in Roger Vadim’s “Barbarella”? “Oh, maybe back in the early ‘70s” she thought that way.

Then she told about the day, coming home from the “Morning After” set, “when I was really kind of down and my kids (Vanessa Vadim, 18, a student at Smith, and Troy Garity, 13, who has Hayden’s mother’s maiden name) were watching it. It was quintessential ‘60s, it was a romp.”

Bridges laughed and suggested, “Maybe ‘King Kong’ was my ‘Barbarella.’ I don’t regret doing it but I remember thinking, ‘What a drag!’ Take after take, maybe 30 takes, waiting for the damn smoke in the fog bank to be right, and it’s right and your performance is all dried up.”

“There were three (career) high points,” Fonda said. “ ‘Coming Home’ because it was the first movie I produced. I didn’t produce it, but Bruce Gilbert (producer of “Morning After”) and I developed it. It was like a baby you nurtured for six years. Very personal. The second one was ‘The Dollmaker.’ And ‘On Golden Pond.’ ”

The movie where she and her father really reconciled?

“No! No, that sounds good in print,” she interrupted. “Like that was the Big Reconciliation. We had reconciled, you know. I guess we always loved each other, but I think when I married Tom, he sort of realized that I was a serious person. He really respected Tom. We just began to talk on other levels. It was the first time we worked together as professionals. ‘Golden Pond’ was a film again that Bruce and I produced, so that I was also in a position of presenting my father with a film that would give him the (Academy) Award. And that was a very . . . what can you do for a parent like that? To be able to come up with a play like that for him that you make it possible for him to do? . . . .

“Now you go,” she prompted.

“Yeah,” he began slowly: “In each movie you kind of have ups and down. There’s moments all of a sudden you get to examine all different kinds of facets of human emotions. And love. You get to live little mini-lifetimes where real love courses through your body. It’s funny, actors know it. Also, when you’re acting, you’re about to jump, 12 feet down there, take after take, and you really hurt. You stand up, here on the carpet, like this ,” he gestured.”Sort of like you say, ‘If I step across this line I die.’ ”

“Does it have anything to do with the thing about your anger in your big scene?” Fonda asked him. “Like you were holding back, and were afraid of being angry, and Sidney was pushing you and then you got angry?”

“Yeah, right,” Bridges replied, “and there are times when you get to do things like fall in love. All day long.”

He kind of fell in love with Jane. “We talked about it,” she smiled.

“It felt just great; it’s true,” he said. “And then there’s a lingering thing right now that’s good, like I still get to love her, you know. I have that great feeling. Like ‘Starman.’ The reason ‘Starman’ was such a high is that he was such a love being.”

Fonda and Bridges also talked about actors’ involvement in politics. Bridges referred to the time Lloyd Bridges was called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the early ‘50s. “My father wasn’t as famous as some of the other guys who were hurting badly, like Larry Parks, my godfather, and it screwed up his life pretty badly.”

When Fonda asked whether political involvement scares him, Bridges--who was hosting a “Morning After” benefit premiere for the End Hunger Network--replied that sometimes it did. “I’m not as heavily involved in issues as you are. . . . To be out there you’ve got to really be concerned with what things you do, you’re aware of that. Maybe the good thing that came out of that is we have to be on our toes to see it doesn’t happen again. . . . How far am I willing to go? It’s stepping over the line. There are limitations but there are also sort of like little challenges.”

Asked for her reflections more than a decade after all that flak over her trip to Hanoi during the Vietnam War, Fonda replied that involvement is “not always about being in the forefront, it’s not about keeping some profile. It’s about doing what you feel at appropriate times in ways that are appropriate. When you’re young, your ways aren’t so appropriate. . . . Of course, I have made mistakes, and I have learned from them. I have learned how to more effectively channel what I do. I’m not a good organizer, but I am a good fund-raiser, and a good spokesperson. I’m a good intermediary for those people who have divisions and larger numbers of people who want to be inspired. I think we are all interested in saving the environment and having clean air and clean water,” she said, “and the last election proved that. Proposition 65 to clean up the water (passed). Republican or Democrat, we want a safe planet that is livable and we don’t want wars.

“I think our job as actors is to try to use our celebrity responsibly, and even better when it’s possible, which is the hardest thing in the world, when we can use our art responsibly. And that doesn’t always mean making message films. It means showing life in all its complexities, preferably with some humor, in ways that will shed light on our dilemmas, and give people hope and solutions.”

As the conversation drew to a close, Fonda suddenly turned to Bridges. “You’ve got to come up (to her Santa Barbara ranch) for Easter. Bring your daughters. This has become an Easter tradition. Every year. Friends and families and small children. We have magic shows and square dances, and I’m the bad Easter bunny.”