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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Actress, activist, sex kitten, entrepreneur, Christian, mogul's wife, lightning rod, for almost 70 years Jane Fonda has lived out the history of American women.
Apr 5, 2005 | About halfway through Jane Fonda's new autobiography, she recounts a 1988 meeting with a group of furious Vietnam veterans trying to bar her from coming to Waterbury, Conn., to shoot the movie "Stanley & Iris." The group has burned Fonda in effigy, so she suggests a group-therapy session to heal the wounds. She writes that one of the angry vets told her afterward, "'You walked in, and I said to myself, Oh, she's so little. Just one little woman.'"
Jane Fonda may be one little woman, but she has written a big book. Her autobiography, uninspiringly titled "My Life So Far," chronicles her experiences as poor little rich girl in Hollywood, student at Vassar, space-age sex object in France, and activist in Southeast Asia. Involved in the feminist, civil rights and antiwar movements, Fonda has also won two Oscars. She revolutionized the exercise industry before marrying a mogul and giving up her professional life. She's suffered from bulimia, anorexia and a Dexedrine addiction. She has found God and runs a teen pregnancy-prevention program. Married to three wildly different men (French filmmaker Roger Vadim, politician Tom Hayden, CNN magnate Ted Turner), Fonda is biological mother to two children, adoptive mother and stepmother to a passel of others, including the daughter of a couple of Black Panthers. She has been an equestrian, learned to fly-fish, studied ballet, had fake breasts implanted and removed, and accumulated a hefty FBI file. It would not be a stretch to say that Jane Fonda has embodied a good deal of American women's history from 1937 to the present. Her 600-page autobiography -- which she wrote so that she could "own" her story, whatever that means -- is more personal revelation than cultural analysis, making it unclear how well Fonda understands the role she's played in history, or the way that history has played with her.
Fonda's series of timely transformations combined with her bumbling, slightly daffy attitude make her a Forrest Gump-ian figure. If something was happening in culture or politics, count on Fonda to have been nearby -- if not to have participated in it or created it herself. As the plane carrying her to Las Vegas for her 1965 wedding to Vadim rises out of Los Angeles, she happens to notice that Watts is on fire. While making "Barefoot in the Park" in 1967, her costar Robert Redford kvells about the little A-frame house he's just built in Utah. The house will become the Sundance Institute. In 1982, home-video magnate Stuart Karl suggests that Fonda turn her nascent exercise franchise -- founded to fund Hayden's political interests -- into a series of tapes. Fonda writes, "Home video? What's that? Like most people back then, I didn't own a VCR." "Jane Fonda's Workout" is, today, still the biggest-selling video of all time.
Fonda's book begins with disquieting recollections of her mother, a social butterfly named Frances Ford Seymour. By the time Jane (born "Lady Jayne Seymour Fonda") and her brother, Peter, are old enough to remember, Seymour has lapsed into periods of mental illness exacerbated by the fact that her husband, the actor Henry Fonda, has lost interest in their marriage. At 9, Fonda remembers watching her mother try desperately to get her father's attention by walking around naked. "She was probably still very beautiful, but -- oh, how I hate myself for this betrayal of her -- I saw her through my father's judgmental eyes," writes Fonda. "She wasn't doing the right things to make him love her. And what it said to me was that unless you were perfect and very careful, it was not safe to be a woman. Side with the man if you want to be a survivor." Fonda also recalls her disgust at seeing Seymour's mangled breast after an augmentation went awry. When Fonda is 11, her mother dies; Jane is told it was a heart attack. Soon after, she reads in a movie magazine that Seymour slit her own throat with a razor.
It's Fonda's guilt about her relationships with her parents that provides the foundation for much of her story: In trying to please her often-absent dad and not be like her mom, she winds up in three unfulfilling marriages to men as emotionally chilly as her father and repeats her mother's quest for physical perfection (including her own breast augmentation). She enters her father's profession, appearing in classics like "Klute," "The China Syndrome," "Barbarella," "Coming Home," "The Morning After" and "On Golden Pond." Having absorbed Henry's quiet, left-leaning politics, Fonda becomes a loud activist, and gets labeled "Hanoi Jane" after her 1972 trip to North Vietnam.
