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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
But all the self-flagellation leaves something out: Fonda's obsession with women. Whatever she may say, Fonda simply cannot convince a reader that she prizes male over female every time. She may not have liked her mother much, but the rest of her story is full of respect and admiration -- both intellectual and physical -- for other women, and much of it sounds more authentic than her affection for men. As a teenager Fonda notices Greta Garbo's "healthy and athletic" body; she comments that friend Elisabeth Vaillard "was handsome in a Georgia O'Keeffe way," and describes her producing partner Paula Weinstein as "a tall brunette with sexy brown eyes." She is full of love for her onetime stepmother Susan Blanchard, for friend Brooke Hayward, for Signoret, and for Dot, her daughter's nanny. She mysteriously points out to Hayden that a baby sitter is sexy (he promptly initiates an affair). And hilariously, in the chapters about the unwanted threesomes with Vadim, Fonda writes: "I'll tell you what I did enjoy: the mornings after, when Vadim was gone and the woman and I would linger over our coffee and talk." Whether or not Fonda has lesbian impulses -- she denies the rumors that she and Vaillard were lovers -- her obvious desire to surround herself with beautiful, compelling women belies her claim that she played only to the guys. Fonda may have seen herself as a man-pleaser, but her story makes it clear that it was often other women who pleased her best.
The confusions about gender are nowhere clearer than in the book's chapter about the making of "On Golden Pond." Fonda was a producer and supporting actress in the film, which starred Katharine Hepburn and her father. "On Golden Pond" has always been read as a cathartic coming-together of Jane and Henry Fonda, since the fictional relationship between Chelsea and Norman Thayer so closely mirrored the frosty bond between the real-life daughter and father.
When shooting the pivotal scene in which Chelsea (Jane) tells Norman (Henry) she'd like them to be friends, Fonda makes her father's eyes well up by touching his arm unexpectedly. She describes it as a very moving moment. But when it's time for her close-up on the same scene, she finds herself unable to cry. Fonda spies Hepburn -- who comes across in this book as a whacked-out, crotchety Yoda figure -- in the bushes, clenched fists in the air, cheering her on. "Katharine Hepburn to Jane Fonda; mother to daughter," writes Fonda, "she literally gave me the scene."
Hepburn also goads Fonda into performing her own back-flip in the film, another of the major turning points in the fictional father-daughter relationship. Afraid of Hepburn's disapproval, Fonda forgoes a body double and spends all summer practicing the difficult dive herself. One day, she gets it. "As I crawled, battered and bruised, onto the shore, out of the nearby bushes appeared Ms. Hepburn. She must have been hiding there, watching me practice. She walked over to where I was standing and said in her shaky, nasal, God-is-a-New-Englander voice, 'Don't you feel good?'" Fonda acknowledges that the dynamic was skewed. "It was odd," she writes. "In the film the back-flip was to prove myself to my father. In real life I had proved myself to Ms. Hepburn. Dad probably couldn't have cared less if I'd done the dive myself or used a stunt double." Fonda may think she spent her life looking for her daddy's approval; scenes like this suggest that her dead mother may have left an even deeper scar.
Fonda's story, complete with its parenting "issues," its messy marriages and divorces, and of course its historical backdrop, is a peculiarly American document. Fonda spends a lot of time in her discussion of Vietnam insisting that she is a patriot, but her patriotism is perfectly evident throughout her life: in her obsession with her father's portrayals of Abraham Lincoln and Tom Joad and Clarence Darrow, in her examination of several presidential administrations, in her interest in social justice. But it's also clear in her unexpected fascination with the country's landscape. There are the lichen-covered stone walls of Connecticut and smoggy valleys of Southern California, sure. But what's surprising are Fonda's detours, like a too-good-to-be-true early-1980s bus trip she makes to the Ozark and Smoky mountains with her own personal spirit guide, Dolly Parton, in which she cooks and eats a possum. Fonda also writes rapturously of rowing through South Carolina swamps on an early-morning quail hunt with Turner. And then there's the chapter section she begins, "One day around the time I turned 59, I was participating in the annual bison round-up on one of Ted's New Mexico ranches."
There's an awful lot of personal terrain that Fonda only touches on in her book. Readers might have appreciated a clearer and more thorough discussion of her religious epiphanies, a longer look at what happened to her children and brother. Only a few sentences are spent on her own drug and alcohol use, and she declines to name several of the men with whom she had important affairs or go into detail on why her marriage to Turner ended. Of course, many memoirists could have woven individual books from each thread of Fonda's personal tapestry: Vietnam, eating disorders, growing up with a famous father, marriage to famous men, exercise dynasty ...
Fonda somehow mashes it all into one book. Does she contradict herself? Sure she does. She contains multitudes.
