Site Presented By
Saturday, Nov 28, 2009
Fonda's multiple and varied incarnations make for moments of vertiginous absurdity, especially during the 1960s when she is getting her consciousness raised while living in France with Vadim and making Hollywood movies. Al "Grandpa Munster" Lewis teaches her about the Black Panther Party on the set of "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" And to satisfy her curiosity about what exactly is going on in Vietnam, she visits her mentor Simone Signoret, a leftist actress married to Yves Montand, at the couple's home outside of Paris. "Bringing a bottle of fine cabernet and a platter of cheeses, she took me out to the back porch, where we ensconced ourselves in an arbor," writes Fonda. Signoret fills Fonda in on the history of French colonialism, and how Ho Chi Minh petitioned Truman for help and was ignored. "She stopped to sip her wine," writes Fonda. "I took notes."
In the same vein is her awakening to the civil rights movement in America, which takes place while she is floating in an inflatable raft off the shores of St. Tropez, reading "The Autobiography of Malcolm X." "It rocked me to my core ..." she writes. "I began to search my soul to see which kind of white person I was. While theoretically I didn't think I was racist, I hadn't had enough contact with black people to know with certainty ... Malcolm had allowed me for the first time to have a glimpse into what racism feels like to a black man. What I was not ready to acknowledge was how the black women in his life were viewed as mostly irrelevant, voiceless, subservient." There you have it: major contradictions presented by the social movements of the mid-20th century, as considered by young Jane Fonda floating on her raft in St. Tropez.
Fonda's political thinking inevitably becomes more rigorous with age, and by the time she gets to the chapters about Vietnam and activism, she relies heavily on -- and footnotes -- documents like the Pentagon Papers and her own FBI files, which she has obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. At one point, she quotes transcripts of conversation between Nixon, H.R. Haldeman and Henry Kissinger as evidence that despite public denials by the government, the U.S. was bombing dikes in North Vietnam, leaving Vietnamese civilians vulnerable to drowning and starvation. This was ostensibly the reason she visited the country in 1972, enraging veterans by meeting with POWs, addressing troops on Radio Hanoi, and sitting on an anti-aircraft gun that had been used to shoot at American planes. It earned her the nickname Hanoi Jane, and her story about the trip will surely be the centerpiece of most of the press about her book.
Though her explanation of the trip is being billed as "an apology" for her actions, it's a vast overstatement. "I do not regret that I went," she writes. "My only regret about the trip was that I was photographed sitting in a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun site." In the chapter, she claims that she was led by guides to the gun, and didn't realize how it looked until minutes after she stepped away, when she became horrified about how the image could be read. Now, she writes, "I realize that it is not just a U.S. citizen laughing and clapping on a Vietnamese antiaircraft gun: I am Henry Fonda's privileged daughter who appears to be thumbing my nose at the country that has provided me these privileges ... And I am a woman who is seen as Barbarella, a character existing on some subliminal level as an embodiment of men's fantasies: Barbarella has become their enemy ... I carry this heavy in my heart. I always will."
Gender ambivalence undergirds Fonda's entire narrative. It connects her childhood traumas, when she became obsessed with transsexual Christine Jorgensen because she herself wanted to be a boy, to her adult sexual relationships, in which she admits she gets subsumed in her male partners. She writes about women in politics, women in business, and women's health issues. During her marriage to Ted Turner, Fonda becomes interested in Christianity, but is concerned about her place in its patriarchal structure. There is a lot of Ensler-inspired writing about her vagina, and even a few pages in which she frets about the connections between gender inequity and overpopulation.
It's an impressive examination of how being a woman seeps into every corner of a personal, political, professional and physical life. But as fraught as she admits her relationship to her own womanhood is, there are complications that show up in the book that she doesn't even seem conscious of. At times it feels as though she gets as far as sex-positive therapy-heavy diagnoses but can move no further in her own analysis: She felt she had to be perfect, she sought out uncommunicative men, she needed to move her feminism from her head to her body. But there is a lot more going on in her story than she seems to understand.
Throughout, Fonda castigates herself for being the kind of woman who lives to please a man, starting with her willingness to place worms on a fish hook to impress her father while her brother is too grossed-out to do so. These impulses certainly play themselves out in her marriages. She allows Vadim to bring other women into their bed for threesomes she now claims to have hated. She stays with Hayden who, obviously threatened by her success, makes her feel insignificant and stupid. (Hayden comes off as the biggest loser in the bunch.) By the time she meets Turner, whose comically energetic desire for her can't mask the fact that he has no interest in what she has to say and that he insists she quit her jobs, it's tempting to shake a fist at Fonda and ask her why she can't just stand up to a man, already! It's not only a question for readers. Fonda reports that when she asks her grown daughter Vanessa to help make a movie about her life, Vanessa spits back, "Why don't you just get a chameleon and let it crawl across the screen?" Fonda admits that maybe she "simply become[s] whatever the man I'm with wants me to be: 'sex kitten,' 'controversial activist,' 'ladylike wife on the arm of corporate mogul.'"
