Who Was the Blond Mystery Sister in ‘Jane Fonda in Five Acts’?

HBO’s Jane Fonda in 5 Acts answers questions both trivial and profound about Jane Fonda, an actress whose identity over the past 80 years has included wholesome daughter of Henry Fonda, anti-American villain, and Emmy-nominated Netflix original-series star.

The documentary reveals how she managed to look uninhibited in her naked Barbarella scene during her sex kitten phase, explains why she posed on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun vehicle during her war-activist phase, and discloses what happened to the tens of millions generated by her workout-video empire during her leg-warmer phase.

The current Grace and Frankie headliner, whose three ex-husbands include billionaire CNN founder Ted Turner, even explained the genesis of her early-1970s hair style, which the documentary calls the Klute cut — a complex forebear of the mullet.

But there’s one obvious question left unanswered in the two-hour-15-minute HBO movie spanning Fonda’s eighty-plus years here on Earth.

Among the childhood pictures with Jane’s family, consisting of her Grapes of Wrath star father, mother Frances Ford Seymour, and brother, Peter Fonda — who would grow up to star in Easy Rider — there are a few that contain a blond mystery older sister.

One of the photos shows the girl at around 11 or 12. She is lithe and has wispy hair and a sweet face. She looks like a pre-teen Saoirse Ronan.

But no one featured on Jane Fonda in 5 Acts mentions her by name. In a clip of Henry Fonda receiving the Stage Father of the Year Award of 1952, he references only Jane and Peter.

The hidden sister doesn’t even merit a caption superimposed on the screen.

So who is Jane Fonda’s mystery sister?

Well, identifying her was simple. Numerous sources list her as Frances de Villers Brokaw, the daughter of Jane and Peter’s mother with her first husband, George Tuttle Brokaw.

It took some digging to find facts about her life. Here are four:

1

Frances De Villers Brokaw was American aristocracy before she became Henry Fonda's step-daughter.

A 1936 AP story described her mother as a “social registrant.” Little Frances’ birth father, George Tuttle Brokaw, was a lawyer whose family owned a mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. His first wife was Clare Boothe, who went on to become an editor at Vanity Fair and U.S. ambassador to Italy and Brazil.

2

She didn't need the Fondas' money.

Little Frances, nicknamed “Pan,” was already independently wealthy when her mother married Henry Fonda. A 1939 UP account described her at age 8 as “heiress to a large fortune and to a $1,000 a month income from the estate of her late father George T. Brokaw, wealthy New York Sportsman.” At 14, she inherited “one-fourth ownership of the New York Guaranty Trust Company and one-third of all the holdings of the multi-million dollar Brokaw corporations,” via her grandfather’s estate, the UP reported in 1945.

3

She endured more tragedy than her famous half-sister and half-brother..

Her father, an alcoholic, drowned at age 51 when he stumbled into a swimming pool at a sanitarium, according to Jane Fonda: The Private Life of a Public Woman by Patricia Bosworth. Ann Clare Brokaw, her half-sister by her birth father, died in an auto accident at age 19. And Frances Seymour Fonda, the mother little Frances shared with Jane and Peter (pictured above), committed suicide by slitting her own throat at age 42 in a mental institution, soon after Henry Fonda asked her for a divorce so he could marry Susan Blanchard, an actress 23 years younger than him. (Frances Seymour Fonda’s suicide was such big news that my mother remembers where she was when she saw the headline.)