After 'Golden Pond': Oscar-winner has new novel out

Admit it: When you think about “On Golden Pond” (which came to mind after it recently aired on Turner Classic Movies), you think about New Hampshire.

After all, the award-winning movie was filmed in 1980 in Holderness, and its aquatic co-stars (“the loons, Norman, the loons!”) if not our state bird, certainly should be.

So it’s a little surprising to learn that the man from whose fertile mind the plot, play and screenplay for “On Golden Pond” sprang is not a Granite State native. Ernest Thompson actually hails from Bellows Falls, Vermont, and grew up in Maryland (though he spent much of his childhood in New England).

But he lives here now, in a handsome farmhouse not far from the movie stand-in for Golden Pond, Squam Lake.

It’s also surprising to learn that Thompson is not at all reminiscent of his most famous character, Norman Thayer Jr., the cantankerous retired professor played in the movie by late iconic actor Henry Fonda who is at the heart of the winsome, poignant movie. Astoundingly, he wrote the script at the tender age of 28, and some 45 years later, Thompson, with his luxurious silver mane and rangy frame, might still be an actor, which he was before the Oscar he won for “Pond” in 1982 catapulted him to the Hollywood A-list stratosphere.

But that Flavor of the Month status that followed his garnering the “shiny piece of metal,” as he refers to the Academy Award that sits on his mantelpiece, never went to his head. 

“I didn’t have much taste for fame,” he said, sitting in the spacious living room of the beautifully restored 19th century home in the Lakes Region that he shares with his wife, Kerrin.

“Sure, for a while I was deluged with projects after I won the Oscar,” he says. “But I wasn’t good at schmoozing, and I wasn’t comfortable trying to do it.”

Although he did live in Los Angeles, it wasn’t in Hollywood but in Malibu, out by the beach. And by his mid-30s, he had fled back to New Hampshire. “I was 32 when I won the Oscar. I was hired and fired from other movies, and I decided it was better for me to keep my distance,” Thompson says.

He references a life lesson he learned from stage and screen star Katharine Hepburn, whom he befriended after the filming of “Pond” and who starred in his next play, “The West Side Waltz.”

“She told me it’s important to have a life outside your work. Kate’s refuge was a place in Connecticut, where she could go rake leaves and unwind.”

He bought the farm in New Hampshire shortly after the movie was filmed on location. Now it’s not only where he unwinds from the national book tour — doing readings like the one at the Los Angeles Barnes & Noble that “Hacks” star Jean Smart attended (shown on today’s cover) — that he’s doing to promote his book but is also the site of playwriting master classes he holds for eight lucky people each year.

While it’s the movie version of “On Golden Pond” to which most of us relate, it was as a playwright that Thompson cut his teeth in the dramatic form, and it was as a play that “Pond” first found an audience. In fact, it is still finding audiences — a “very good production,” he said, is currently being staged at Ivoryton Playhouse in Essex, Conn., with actor James Naughton starring as Norman.

Naughton, Thompson interjects — not to drop names but because he kind of knows every Baby Boomer who ever trod the boards or made a movie over the past four decades — acted with him in a 1974 TV movie, “F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Last of the Belles,” which starred Richard Chamberlain and Blythe Danner, and which helped bring “Pond” to Broadway, but more about that later.

Thompson was “a very busy actor” right out of college, acting in plays, TV and movies. But as the ecosystem changed in Hollywood, he found himself out of work. He turned to writing.

His parents both being educators — his dad, like Norman, was a college professor — Thompson says that he was always writing something from childhood on.

Playwriting, he says, came naturally. “As an actor, it was a medium that I knew,” he explained. “I had read thousands of plays and been in a bunch of them.”

His first foray into playwriting was three one-act plays.

A friend shared the works with director George Shaefer, with whom Thompson had worked as an actor on “F. Scott Fitzgerald.” Schaefer’s first reaction, he recalls, was one of amusement: “So big Ernest wrote a play.”

Though the one-acters — always a tough sell, he says — didn’t make much of a ripple, Thompson was nevertheless determined to be a successful playwright. “And so on Memorial Day weekend 45 years ago, I sat down and banged out ‘On Golden Pond.’ Yes, in three days,’” he says, sounding amazed.

Also amazing, by Labor Day 1978 it had debuted as a (short-lived) off-Broadway production at the Hudson Guild Theatre in New York with Frances Sternhagen and late Broadway actor Tom Aldredge.

Unfortunately, it was during a newspaper strike, so The New York Times didn’t immediately review it. But on word of mouth, some angel backers swooped in, and it found its way to bigger stages — earning raves in 1979 at the Eisenhower Theatre at Washington, D.C.’s, Kennedy Center, when The Washington Post termed it “A Surprisingly Marvelous ‘Golden Pond” — and finally on Broadway. International acclaim followed, with productions staged in farflung locations like Finland and South Africa.

And by 1980, Big Ernest’s play was being optioned as a movie with big-name Hollywood stars.

But back to that play. How did a 20-something channel the inner demons that Thayer, estranged from his daughter, in the throes of early Alzheimer’s, wrestled with so eloquently? Where did “On Golden Pond” come from?

Thompson ponders the question, then says, “It’s about Norman and Ethel, of course, but I really wanted to write about the end of an era. Gone were the days when people would spend an entire summer at their lake house. That time was ending.”

Other tidbits: He confesses he “stole a little bit” of Norman from his father, a professor “with a wry sense of humor.”

And the name Norman? “My last acting job was a pilot I did for Mary Tyler Moore’s production company and it starred Norman Lloyd, a character actor who recently died at the grand old age of 106.”

Ethel, he says, is a family name.

Thompson then divulges it was Jane Fonda who decided it was something she wanted to turn into a major motion picture. The timing was right. She was seeking to repair her relationship with her father, as the elder Fonda was in ill health and she saw the part of Norman as a “gift” for him.

Hepburn had already seen the play three times, but Henry had not. When he finally did, he, too, was in.

And what a gift it was, to just about everyone concerned. Not only did Thompson win the Oscar for “Best Writing, Based on Material from Another Medium,” but Fonda and Hepburn also won Oscars.

And the accolades didn’t stop there: In all, “Golden Pond” was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress, Best Cinematography, Best Sound, Best Film Editing and Best Score (by Dave Grusin). It garnered six nods at the 1982 Golden Globes, taking Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Actor for Fonda. It also was nominated for five BAFTA awards (the British version of the Oscars), with Hepburn winning Best Actress.

Thompson also won the Writers Guild of America award for Best Drama Adapted from Another Medium.

Turning his play into a movie, Thompson says, was at first a bit of a tough sled.

“I had never written a screenplay, and I didn’t have the first notion of how to do it,” he recalled. “Of course I had read scripts as an actor, but all I cared about was learning my lines. I didn’t know about ‘Fade In’ and ‘Exterior.’” So he went to the picture’s producer, Bruce Gilbert, and asked, “Would you happen to have some screenplays I could look at?”

“Sure,” came the reply, and before long, Thompson was holding scripts for three big movies Gilbert had just produced for Jane Fonda — “China Syndrome,” “Julia” and “Nine to Five,” a comedy she had recently wrapped and whose co-star Dabney Coleman ended up playing her character’s boyfriend in “Pond.”

Once he mastered the nuts and bolts of screenwriting, Thompson figured out his job adapting the play to the big screen was to ‘open it up.’”

“In the play, you never see ‘the smart-ass kid’ in the boat with the ‘grumpy old guy,’’” he says. “That’s what’s magical about theater. You feel like you’ve seen it, but you’ve only got that information from the dialogue. The fishing all takes place off stage, during Act One and Act Two.”

But the movie version got to utilize the gorgeous location of Squam Lake and included a scene in which Chelsea (Jane Fonda) conquers a long-held fear of diving.

In fact, Thompson wanted to make Fonda’s role bigger than the truncated part of Chelsea, who in the play is always arriving or leaving.

“She was my benefactress; it was because of her that the movie was even made,” Thompson says. “So I offered to make her role bigger in the screen version. But I have to give props to Jane —she would have none of it. It was Henry’s movie, not hers, she said.”

Meanwhile, Squam Lake almost didn’t make it onto the silver screen as Golden Pond. And in fact, the play itself is set on a lake in “the Maine woods.”

“The location scout from the studio (“Pond” was released by Universal) looked at over 200 lakes and ponds,” Thompson recalls. “Finally, it was between a lake in Belfast and the one in Holderness. What swayed him was the fact they had to overnight the film each day to be processed in L.A., then flown back the next day so the director (Mark Rydell) could see the ‘dailies.’”

However, the Maine location was several hours from the closest big airport, and Squam was only an hour and a half from Logan. Squam it was.

Eventually, of course, Thompson came to love the Granite State almost as much as the Pine Tree one.

So it doesn’t come as a shock that New Hampshire also plays a supporting role in “The Book of Maps,” the new novel from which Thompson will read from next Tuesday evening at the Pope Memorial Library — and which he allows could make a fantastic screenplay.

“Woodley, N.H.” is the book’s destination for a 15-day road trip on which soon-to-be divorced filmmaker Brendan Tibbet takes his 10-year-old kid, using a 1930s map book as a guide.

And while there are plenty of adventures — encounters with bears and bad guys — as in “Pond,” there is also an affecting familial subplot: The purpose of the trip is to break the terrible news to the boy that his parents are splitting up, news that Tibbet somehow keeps putting off sharing.

“The journey is a like a ticking clock,” Thompson explains. “‘When’s he going to tell him?’ When? That’s what the wife keeps asking, and Brendan keeps saying, ‘Soon.’”

The journey, however, is also a journey of discovery for the failed husband and father, someone Thompson describes as “an impetuous overgrown boy, someone who just keeps getting into trouble.”

Just a few days into the trip, as Thompson relates it, the anti-hero realizes, “You only have 13 days left to prove you’re worthy of being loved.”

Based on his national tour for “Book of Maps” Thompson says he has figured out that the women in the audience in particular seem to really home in on his message of redemption in the novel, which is, “It really is possible for men to improve.”

Thus, if the definition of a tragedy is when the hero does not change, this sounds like it might just have a happy ending.

“It’s a love story between a parent and a child,” is how Thompson ultimately describes it. It takes place just after 9/11, and the little boy is questioning all sorts of things, “and the father really has to step up.”

Thompson started writing the book when the pandemic hit, throwing the worlds of Hollywood and Broadway into paralysis.“Everything seemed to close down in 2020, and Kerrin and I came up to the farmhouse, and I wrote every day,” Thompson says.

He also recorded an audiobook version, and perhaps there might even be a screenplay in the future. Asked who he sees playing the father, Thompson laughs. “The guy is 52, so the sky’s the limit. How many actors that age are out there? Matt Damon? George Clooney?”

However, he doesn’t see it as a movie. “Streaming. Six to eight episodes,” he declares, as if he just might have given this some thought.

White Birch bookstore owner Laura Cummings gives it two big thumbs-up. “I am reading his book now,” she said last weekend, “and it’s really good — I am laughing all the time. I didn’t think I would go for a father son adventure across the country, not being a father or a son, but he’s got me!”

Speaking of fathers and sons, the apple apparently doesn’t fall far from the tree: Thompson confided last week that his son, 32-year-old August Thompson, recently sold a novel to Penguin Random House. Titled “Anyone’s Ghost,” it is due out next summer.

As for his own next move, Thompson says he’s dabbling with the idea of writing non-fiction, harvesting his Hollywood and Broadway friendships into anecdotes of famous actresses he has known (“I’m thinking of calling it ‘Dances with Divas,’” he says, listing Liza Minnelli, Shirley MacLaine, Barbra Streisand and Julie Andrews in the pantheon of star power the likes of which you don’t see much anymore).

A male actor follow-up might be titled “Duels with Dudes,” says Thompson, who seems to have a liking for alliteration.

But those are just a few of the many ideas boiling away in the feverish imagination of Ernest Thompson. A sequel to “Golden Pond”? Could be. Some songs to play with Al Hospers at The Farmstand music venue in Chocorua? Certainly. A movie with “Return of Secaucus Seven” co-star Gordon Clapp? Workin’ on it.

You get the sense that for Thompson, no minute is wasted because all of this good fortune, made possible by a play written over the course of a long weekend, isn’t taken for granted.

Several times during the interview, he starts sentences with, “If I ever would have imagined I could list Katharine Hepburn as a good friend” or “If I ever thought a painting by Henry Fonda would be hanging in my living room …”

And then he smiles and shakes his head, as if in wonderment at it all.

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