by Jane Fonda
I remembered how frightened I was of the noise of a motorcycle. During the Second World War, in the newsreels that would be shown in movie theaters before the main feature, Nazis were often shown riding motorcycles, so every time I heard one I would shout, “Get out of the way! Here comes Hitler!”
Dad playing with me in our pool.
Me around age two, making it clear to the camera that Mother’s lap was not where I wanted to be.
Mother, Dad, me, Peter, and Frances, my half-sister. Dad had just come home on leave from the navy during World War II.
I remembered the exhilaration I felt galloping bareback through the avocado groves in Pacific Palisades, California, unafraid, the Lone Ranger!
I tracked down Diana Dunn, my best friend from middle school, whom I had not seen in more than fifty years. She told me stories I’d forgotten, like the one about the time several of us found a dead snake in the road as we walked back from the hockey field. We scooped it up and put it inside the desk of a teacher we didn’t like. When she opened her desk drawer and saw the snake, she went into shock. All of us were called into the principal’s office and asked who was responsible for the snake. My friend told me that I was the only one who admitted to the prank. She recounted a similar experience when, during a sleepover at a friend’s house, we’d knocked over an antique lamp while playing hide-and-seek. Our friend’s mother was very upset and wanted to know who was responsible. I fessed up, and because of my telling the truth, the mother didn’t punish us.
I recalled the girl at summer camp who beat me up and rubbed my face in the dirt as she shouted, “Don’t think you’re special just because Henry Fonda is your father!” I refused to cry, but it lodged in my memory as a terrifying experience.
Newly discovered anecdotes like these gave me confidence, made me feel I had some good qualities after all, that I wasn’t just the lazy, foolish girl my father seemed to see me as. The faint outlines of a brave, resilient, honest little girl began to emerge, and I realized that I liked her, even if her parents hadn’t seemed to be too interested!
PARENTS, GRANDPARENTS, AND FAMILY
Perhaps the most important part of my research on Act I was that which I did on my parents and grandparents. I needed to know who they were behind the parental masks. What did they really care about, and why did they do the things they did? I focused on how my parents were treated by my grandparents, what state of mind my parents might have been in when they married each other and when I was born. I called and met with second and third cousins who knew my parents or grandparents; an aging aunt; and friends of the family who were still alive and reachable. I was like a sleuth, putting together the puzzle of a family, a self, a childhood, piece by piece. I began to see patterns and reasons behind things that had been boarded up in my house of memories.
I knew I was not the sort of person who could have done this life review and this family research much earlier. I needed the challenge of my Third Act to compel me to take the time and be brave enough to face it, to declare a memory open house, to seek the truth about myself and my family. Now I had an added incentive, too: I wanted to get my life right going forward.
Me, around age three.
Thus, I learned that there had likely been a long history of undiagnosed depression in the Fonda men, as well as what my cousins described as an almost pathological abhorrence for heavy women, especially those with thick legs. Ahh. My dad!
I learned that my father had always avoided any situation that would cause him to be emotional. He’d even refused to attend his mother’s funeral, choosing instead to stay in New York, where he was performing in a play. Work always came first for him, perhaps as a way to avoid real-life emotion. He didn’t even miss a performance of Mister Roberts to be with Peter and me the night our mother killed herself. (I learned that she had not died of a heart attack only when, a year later, I read in a gossip column that it had been suicide.)
My grandfather William Brace, Aunt Harriet, Dad, Aunt Jayne, and Herberta, my grandmother.
Members of the Fonda family, including Sue Fonda, David’s wife; Aunt Harriet; Becky Fonda, Peter’s wife; Peter Fonda; Tina Fonda; David Fonda; me; Cyndi Fonda Dabney; and children, gathered on the porch of Dad’s birth home at the Stuhr Museum in Nebraska.
Family picnic in Omaha, July 1907. Front row, left to right: My father in the lap of my grandmother Herberta, Ethelyn Hinners Fonda holding my aunt Jayne, my grandfather William Brace holding my aunt Harriet. Back row: my great-grandmother “Grammie” Hattie, unknown (could be Hattie’s sister), and my great-grandfather, Ten Eyck Hilton Fonda, Sr.
Dad’s father and mother in front of their home in Omaha.
ACT II
In my second act, the rap on me was that “there was no there there,” that I was only whatever my current husband wanted me to be. In fact, when I asked my daughter, who has made documentary films, to help me with the autobiographical video I was shooting for my sixtieth-birthday party, she said, “Why don’t you just get a chameleon and let it crawl across the screen?” I knew that one important thing I needed to find out through my life review was whether this opinion of me was true. I secretly thought that maybe it was.
With Ted at my sixtieth-birthday party.
ERIC WITTMAYER PHOTOGRAPHY
But as I delved deeper, I could see evidence of a new, stronger me starting to emerge. I felt as though I was owning myself for the first time. There is a there there!
PHYSICAL ABUSE
The most profound event for me during the writing of my memoirs was when I was able to obtain my mother’s medical records from the mental institution where she killed herself. In them, the doctors noted that my grandfather had had the symptoms of a paranoid schizophrenic. He’d boarded up windows and kept the front door bolted because he feared that some man would come and steal his beautiful, much younger wife. The records included a fifteen-page autobiography written by my mother, I assume upon admittance, at the request of the doctors.
In her own words, she revealed that she had been sexually molested at age eight by the piano tuner, the only man my grandfather would unbolt the front door for! All my adult life I had wondered about my mother’s childhood. The older I got and the more I understood about the long-term effects of early trauma, the more I intuited that something bad must have happened to her. Maybe that’s why I had been drawn to studying childhood sexual abuse over the previous five years. My research enabled me to understand what my mother meant when, in recounting her middle and high school years, she wrote, “Boys, boys, boys.” I was able to connect the dots upon reading that she had had six abortions and plastic surgery on her nose and breasts before I was born, in 1937, and that her psychiatric tests at the end were, according to the doctors’ reports, “replete with perceptual distortions, many of them emphasizing bodily defects and deformities.”
By the time I read my mother’s reports I already knew that sexual abuse, be it a one-time trauma or a long-term violation, is not only a physical trauma; its memories carry a powerful emotional and psychic charge and can lead to emotional and psychosomatic illnesses and difficulties with intimacy. The ability to connect deeply with others is broken, and it becomes difficult to experience trust, feel competent, have a sense of self. Thus, another piece of the family’s intimacy puzzle fell into place.
I also knew that sexual abuse robs a young person of her sense of autonomy. The boundaries of her personhood become porous, and she no longer feels the right to claim her psychic or bodily integrity. For this reason, it is not unusual for survivors to become promiscuous starting in adolescence. The message that abuse delivers to the fragile young one is: “All you have to offer is your sexuality, and you have no right to keep it off-limits.” Boys, boys, boys.
GUILT
Then there’s the issue of guilt. It seems counterintuitive that a child would feel guilty about being abused by an adult whom they are incapable of fending off. But children, I learned, are developmentally unable to blame adults. They
must believe that adults, on whom they depend for life and nurturing, are trustworthy. Instead, guilt is internalized and carried in the body, often for a lifetime—a dark, free-floating anxiety and depression that can cross generations. This can lead to hatred of one’s body, excessive plastic surgery, and self-mutilation.
I had learned, years before I’d read my mother’s history of abuse, that these feelings of guilt and shame, the sense of never being good enough, and hatred of one’s body can cast a long shadow. These emotions can span generations, carried on what feels like a cellular level to daughters and even granddaughters. So that’s partly where they came from, my own body issues, my feeling of not being good enough!
Reading my mother’s typed history, with her little penciled notes in the margins, filled me with sadness and with compassion for my mother, as well as gratitude that, fifty years later, her history would allow me to forgive her—and myself. Again the realization swept over me: Her remoteness, her suicide had nothing to do with me. I don’t have to feel guilty. This was an important lesson, this understanding that other people have lives and problems you know nothing about—their behavior is not all about you!
Talking to her few remaining friends and family members, I discovered that my mother, whom I remembered as a nervous, fragile, nonsexual victim, was viewed by her contemporaries as a “rock” on which they could lean in times of need, an icon, an extremely sophisticated, sexy, ebullient woman who attracted men “like moths to a flame.” It took me a while before I managed to replace the pathological version of a mother whose genes I share but had rejected for six decades with this new, powerful vision of her. Maybe she wasn’t able to be the mother my brother and I needed, but she had so many other fascinating, capable, lovable parts to her. I was finally able to see more of the totality of her. This was a mother I wanted to own, and owning her meant that the love-denying defenses I had erected against her came tumbling down. I felt a new lightness of being and knew I was finally coming into my own.
I have written about much of this in my memoirs, but I repeat the stories here because they are so important to me. Perhaps my telling them will trigger your own remembrances of formative experiences. Especially important for me was the discovery of my mother’s childhood sexual abuse. One out of three girls is an abuse survivor, and there is a real possibility that such a trauma has cast a shadow over your own family. You won’t know unless you ask.
In doing my life review, I read books by the famed psychologist Alice Miller; The Drama of a Gifted Child was especially useful. It is about people who survived emotionally and physically abusive childhoods with narcissistic parents because they developed adequate defense systems. Also useful was I Don’t Want to Talk About It, by the therapist Terrence Real, which addresses men’s depression and their difficulty in expressing emotion. My goal was to better understand my father. As it turned out, however, these books also helped me understand my three husbands! Terrence Real writes about the many ways men unconsciously disguise depression with addictions, and about how hard it is for them to allow people to see their underlying sadness. It isn’t manly! This permitted me to view the significant men in my life with forgiveness and compassion. What a wonderful gift to bring into my Third Act!
FORGIVENESS AND GRATITUDE
Forgiveness is at the center of it all, and gratitude. I was able to see how many people had given me so much, had believed in me even when I hadn’t. On a deep, noncerebral level, I could separate who I was from how my parents had behaved toward me.
MY LATE FORTIES AND FIFTIES
When I looked back at Act II, especially my late forties and fifties, I saw that I got stressed out so easily then. I remember feeling like Sisyphus trying to roll a boulder up a mountain. I thought that this was just life. I’d wake up in the morning and my first six thoughts would be negative. I realized that my negativity had been increasing as I aged, and I grew concerned.
Today I do not suffer from the “poor me”s; there is no longer a blanket of negativity weighing me down. I no longer react to today’s dramas with my own drama, partly because I’ve replaced stress with detachment. By that I don’t mean indifference but, rather, an ability to step back and observe events with greater objectivity, fairness, and perception instead of so much subjectivity. This detachment can be one result of doing a life review. Understanding leads to the realization that it’s not just about you! I have been able to carry this newly discovered perspective and wholeness with me into my Third Act—proof that it’s never too late!
With Vadim on our wedding day.
Tom Hayden with Vanessa and Troy.
With Ted at one of his ranches in Montana, in 1977.
© ANNIE LEIBOVITZ/CONTACT PRESS IMAGES
Decommissioning Our Demons
What the experience of doing a life review has taught me is that while we cannot undo what has been, we can change the way we understand and feel about it, and this changes everything. It helps us decommission our demons, frees us from the past, and gives us a boost as we go forward, in new ways, into the rest of our lives.
Self-Confrontation and Transformation
While researching this book, I was surprised to find that a number of psychiatrists advocate the life review process, not for the purpose of wallowing in past problems or pathologies or enshrining our early years in either joy or pain, but as a means of self-confrontation and transformation. We look back, we take responsibility for ourselves, and we move on.
The late Dr. Robert Butler, who was the founding president of the International Longevity Center in New York City, said, “There is a moral dimension to the life review because one looks evaluatively at one’s self, one’s behavior, one’s guilt.” He believed that a life review can lead to atonement, redemption, reconciliation, and affirmation and can help one find a new meaning in life. He noted that “if unresolved conflicts and fears are successfully reintegrated, they can give new significance and meaning to an individual’s life.” I know this can be the case; I have experienced it and the freedom it brings. So, step one in making a whole of your life is spending time on a life review.
As mentioned earlier, Viktor Frankl’s idea that you have the freedom to choose how you respond to a given situation influenced me greatly. Approaching the matter from a different vantage point, quantum theorists have reached a similar conclusion, maintaining that “we determine reality by the manner in which we approach it. If we observe from a different perspective, we ‘discover’ a different reality.”1
Doing a life review can allow us to discover a different reality lurking within those already-lived years. What exquisite freedom this could give us if it allowed us to rearrange our attitudes about our experiences and the people in our lives—the freedom to choose the meaning of our experiences.
Developing New Neural Pathways
If we can learn to assign new meanings to stressful situations, we can actually avoid the biochemical and hormonal reactions that cause damage to our systems, especially with age. Recent cognitive research shows that our ability to change our attitudes and behaviors manifests neurologically, as well. Our brains retain their plasticity well into our Third Acts, and they can be rewired. When we react to a person or the memory of a person or event in a negative way over and over and over, it becomes woven into the fabric of our brain’s neural network, like a well-worn footpath that grows deeper over time. The footpaths are not structural; they are patterns made by electrical and chemical signals that are sent via neurotransmitters to parts of the brain’s hundreds of billions of cells, or neurons; the neurons get into the habit of interacting in certain patterns. But when we change our reactions through new insight, experiences, cognitive therapy, or mediation, no matter how old we are, a neural-pathway shift can occur; the signals can change direction. If we can manage to maintain the new, positive interpretation of the person or event, this new pathway will win out over the formerly hardwired memory. We may not be able to change what happened, but we can change our feelings about
it. This is humankind’s ultimate freedom!
The possibility of treading new neural pathways through the landscape of the past is in itself a worthwhile endeavor as a way to grow, to develop your character, to become whole. What a potentially precious gift doing a life review can be, for ourselves! And, perhaps, for our relatives and children (should we choose to write it down and show it to them): not writing a history for the purpose of impressing or pleasing or reassuring, but to tell our own real story. Our truth may help set our children free. And it will surely help us shape a strong Third Act, one built on a foundation of truth—about who we are and have, actually, always been.
CHAPTER 3
Act I: A Time for Gathering
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
