Like Father, Like Actor

Troy Garity has a lot of family heritage to live up to.

His father, state senator and former antiwar activist Tom Hayden, made history 30 years ago this week by leading demonstrations against the Vietnam War during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. His mother, Jane Fonda, has been a cinematic and political icon for decades.

This month, Garity, 25, is furthering the legacy of both sides of his family. He’s not only acting in his first feature film--”Abbie!,” a biopic about yippie founder Abbie Hoffman--but the role he is playing is close to home: He’s appearing as his father.

“I’m very proud to play my father,” says Garity as he eats green grapes at a restaurant on the Sunset Strip. “My father literally risked his life to make . . . the world a better place for me to grow up in.”

And Garity seems equally proud of his mom’s side of the family. This latest actor from the venerable Fonda dynasty is an unabashed fan of the Fonda movies, which now span 63 years of cinema, from Henry Fonda’s “The Farmer Takes a Wife” in 1935 to, well, “Abbie!”

“ ‘Klute’ is brilliant,” he says of the 1971 picture for which his mom won a best actress Oscar. And his Uncle Peter’s “Easy Rider”? “Loved it,” he says. He also admires his late grandfather’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” “But I like ‘El Norte’ better than ‘Grapes of Wrath’ because I can relate to it more,” he says.

In fact, Garity’s first film appearance, according to his father, involved a brief brush with the Fonda dynasty. During the filming of 1981’s “On Golden Pond,” starring Henry and Jane Fonda, Hayden says he and young Troy “would go out bass fishing with Henry almost every night, and in this nanosecond I think the boat that Henry Fonda is in passes the boat that Troy is in [on screen]. That was actually Troy’s first movie.”

How good an actor is he? “The work that he has done on this movie is very powerful . . . and has nothing to do with his heritage,” says Robert Greenwald, the director of “Abbie!” “It has to do with his talent.”

Others have taken notice, too. Garity, recently named by People magazine as one of “The 50 Most Beautiful People in the World,” is also starring in a Czech-American independent film, “Bohemians,” currently in production.

He’s becoming an actor at around the same age as his famous relatives; Jane made her screen debut at age 23 (“Tall Story”), Peter at 24 (“Tammy and the Doctor”) and cousin Bridget at 24 (“Aria”). And he’s also just two years younger than Hayden was at the time of the Chicago riots.

Though he obviously has no firsthand memories of the ‘60s, he does vividly recall the aftermath, growing up in the Santa Monica family of two leftist legends.

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The Fonda-Hayden household was often under siege for political reasons, according to Garity. He remembers that his parents had to staple chicken-wire to all the windows because people kept throwing things at the house. On some mornings, Hayden or Fonda greeted the new day by checking the family car for bombs. When traveling, they had to contend with hostile picketers at the airport shouting threats.

“[People were] talking about feeding my family to the whales,” Garity recalls. (Hayden and Fonda are now divorced; Fonda did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.)

This is the politically charged era that Greenwald (“The Burning Bed,” “Sweet Hearts Dance”) is trying to re-create in “Abbie!,” which stars Vincent D’Onofrio (as Hoffman), Janeane Garofalo, Jeanne Tripplehorn and Kevin Pollak. (Shooting on the film, which has not yet been picked up for distribution by a studio, wraps in late September.)

The movie tells the story of the protests outside the Democratic Convention that nominated Hubert Humphrey for president on Aug. 28, 1968. In real life, the demonstrations turned violent as Chicago cops beat and clubbed protesters and others--Hayden himself was thrown through a closed window at the Conrad Hilton--in what a government report later called “a police riot.”

The film also dramatizes the chaotic Chicago Seven trial, in which Hayden, Hoffman and five others were charged with conspiring to disrupt the convention. The trial ended with acquittal for all on the conspiracy charges, though five were convicted of trying to incite a riot. All convictions were overturned on appeal in 1972.

Nine months later, Hoffman was arrested on unrelated charges of selling $36,000 of cocaine to an undercover police officer; he became a fugitive in 1974, surrendered to authorities in 1980, served a brief jail term and committed suicide in 1989 at the age of 52.

“Abbie got banged up a lot, he got hurt a lot, he had a lot of guts,” Hayden says. “He would have highs and lows and be fighting all kinds of inner demons all the time.”

Unlike Hoffman, Hayden emerged from the turbulence of the trial with his well-being intact, his eye on public office--and a newborn son. (Troy was actually present at the final Chicago trial that cleared the Seven of contempt in ’73.)

In many ways, Garity looks and sounds much like his dad circa 1968. The deliberate cadence and careful pacing of his speech, the Zen silences and dry wit, and his love of political heroism are all pure Hayden.

Greenwald noted the family resemblance. “We’re sitting in the very first rehearsal on the first day and one of the actors who plays a scene with [Garity] turns to me and says, ‘Boy, it’s uncanny the resemblance that Troy has to Tom Hayden,’ and didn’t know. So I pull Troy aside and said, ‘Troy, let me ask you a question: How do you feel? Do you want me to tell people or would you rather people not know?’ And he turns to me and said, ‘I’m proud of my dad; I want everyone to know.’ ”

“There is an uncanny resemblance,” Hayden agrees. “I think he’s quite a handsome guy and I always thought I was the ugly one in the crowd.” Hayden also sees another family link: “He has some of Henry Fonda’s qualities: He sketches and paints.”

Garity may have been a natural to play his dad, but he still spent time researching the role. “He followed his father around for a week in the house, kind of imitating him and getting down his mannerisms,” Greenwald says. “It’s such a wonderful father-son story.”

“I watched about eight hours of old videotapes of my father [in preparation for the film],” Garity says. “We had some really nice talks about . . . his personal life.” (“What a great therapeutic experience for a father and son,” says Hayden, who was estranged from his own father for many years.)

Fonda never pressured Garity to go into acting, just as Hayden never pressured him to go into politics, because they both wanted him to carve out his own identity. And that’s one reason they named him Garity. “[The name Garity was] mainly a sign to him that he’s not a Hayden and he’s not a Fonda, he’s an independent being,” says Hayden.

“He’s got to be his own man. . . . I don’t want him to be a carbon copy of me,” says Hayden, adding drolly: “[Except] for this week [when he’s shooting the film]. Everyone is entitled to one week when their son is them.”

Garity--who grew up in Santa Monica on the border of Venice, “the best neighborhood in the world”--never sounds so much like his father as when he gets passionate about a political issue, such as the troubles in Northern Ireland, where Garity recently served as a peacekeeper. But he says he would never run for public office, despite the fact that he’s already involved in local community organizing and gang intervention programs such as the Peace Process Network.

“I don’t have that ability [to run for office],” he says in a way that seems to invite someone to contradict him. Somebody interjects that he already sounds like a political candidate, denials and all. Garity smiles, looks a bit flattered and changes his tune somewhat: “I haven’t defined my platform yet.”