by Jane Fonda
These things don’t take away from the fact that Susan wanted to be in a real relationship with me and I was ready to meet her there. She found in me not damaged adolescent goods but a responsive partner. As I look back, I see that my girlhood retreat into the Lone Ranger persona was my way of holding out for a real relationship: If it wasn’t real, I’d just as soon be by myself, thank you. But like a heat-seeking infrared laser beam, I could scan the horizon and pick up the presence of anyone warm and real I could learn from and go there. But by late puberty (by which time Susan and Dad had divorced), I’d turned off the laser beam and settled for whatever relationships were out there, real or not. Being alone didn’t feel like a postpuberty option!
In California that first summer, Dad and Susan would often take Peter and me with them when they went out to dinner in swank Hollywood restaurants like the Brown Derby and Chasen’s, one of Dad’s favorites. We had never been with him in these kinds of social situations before, so while I knew in an abstract sort of way that he was famous, I didn’t know how fame manifested itself in his life. I was struck by how, when he entered a restaurant, there would be a shift in energy, as though he were a magnet. Restaurant owners like Mr. Chasen would call him by name, and as we’d be ushered to Dad’s “special” table or, in the case of Chasen’s, the red leather booth, heads would turn and I’d hear, “Why, that’s . . . ?” being whispered at other tables. Having waiters know your name and what to bring you to drink without your even having to say anything became a sign of celebrity for me. Sometimes his agent from MCA (the Music Corporation of America) or Lew Wasserman and Jules Stein, who ran MCA, and their wives would join us.
Being invited to share Dad’s grown-up world was a chance for me to see how it all worked. I noted with interest how Dad behaved differently in a social setting, how he was warmer and funnier with people who were not intimates, especially after a couple of Jack Daniel’s. But it was Susan I watched most closely, logging in the details of her social moves, how she became very prim with certain older (important) people and riotous with chums like Johnny Swope and Dorothy McGuire from Dad’s early days. Once, driving back to Ocean House, she reached into her dress and pulled out a falsie from her bra, laughing loudly at herself. I wondered if I could ever be that open in front of others. If there was something not perfect about myself, like the size of my breasts or bottom, I always tried to hide it as best I could and hoped no one would notice. I had a tiny waist, about nineteen inches around, and a full, high bottom that seemed to me way too big in proportion to my waist. Worse, I had overheard Dad say that my legs were too heavy. When I heard him say that, I went to bed and slept for two days, the only way I knew to escape those words that haunted me for the rest of my life.
This was a summer when I was closer to Peter than usual, literally and figuratively. Because our bedrooms adjoined and we shared a bathroom, we had ample opportunity to nurse each other’s sunburns and hang together. We’d left our Greenwich friends behind, and all we had was each other as we accommodated ourselves to what was clearly a new chapter of our lives. On weekends at the hotel there would be dances for adults in the grand ballroom on the ground floor, complete with live orchestra. Under Susan’s spell, I had decided dancing was something to be cultivated, so Peter and I would sneak downstairs and waltz madly together in an empty room next to the party. Sometimes we’d slow-dance real close. It was nice to have a brother to practice on safely. That summer I learned how much I cared for my brother, and I also saw more clearly how very different we were.
We have different rhythms, different life views, and different ways of handling situations. A lot of this has to do with Mother’s preferring him, or at least trying to make him hers, while I was more my father’s child. Recently Susan described for me how the differences manifested: “You were watchful, taking everything in. Peter was frenetic, acting out.” Though it wasn’t intentional, Dad was often cruel to Peter. I use the word cruel because, though not deliberate, the effects were the same as cruelty. He often tried to be a good father, doing things he must have done with his father: fishing, flying kites, building model airplanes—the male bonding rituals. But if a parent doesn’t like herself or himself very much, it is the child of the same sex as that parent who has the hardest time. Multiply the impact severalfold if the parent is a celebrity. It’s not just your father who is making you feel like a sissy; it’s an icon, adored by millions as someone of integrity. I don’t think Dad liked himself very much, and perhaps he saw reflected in Peter the sensitivity and emotionalism that he had somehow buried. As Susan once said, “There’s a scream in your dad that’s never been screamed and a laugh that’s never been laughed.”
Dad hated any displays of emotion. “You disgust me,” he would say to at least two wives if they cried. Perhaps it scared him; perhaps he sensed that if he ever allowed his own emotions to surface, they would swallow him up. I believe that early on Dad was taught that to be a “man” you had to disconnect from emotions like tenderness, intimate connection, and need—qualities associated with women. We have all seen how almost universal this is among men and at what price they forfeit these qualities. In my father’s case, the masculine ethic may have been exacerbated by the example set by his father and rugged midwestern stoicism. Like the Ogallala Aquifer that lies beneath the surface of the Sand Hills of his native Nebraska and occasionally pops through the topsoil to create lakes, Dad’s buried “other self” surfaced in his gardening and his artistry: the painting, the needlepoint, his deeply sensitive portrayal of Tom Joad.
As a girl, I intuited the tensions playing themselves out inside him, like opposing forces on a battlefield. It was his underground softness that I loved, that I needed. In I Don’t Want to Talk About It, psychologist Terrence Real says, “Sons don’t want their fathers’ ‘balls’; they want their hearts.” Daughters, too. If Dad could have embraced the sensitive part of himself full-time, he would have been happier, and so would several subsequent generations of us, for the belief system that undergirds the old notion of masculinity is a poison that runs deep. Dad learned the steps to the relational dance of patriarchy at his father’s knee, as his father likely learned it from his father (though sometimes it’s learned on mothers’ knees), and its toxic legacy has continued across generations, until now.
I am determined before I die to try to help change the steps of that dance—for myself, for my children, and for others.
Peter is all deep sweetness, kind and sensitive to his core. He would never intentionally harm anything or anyone. In fact, he once argued with me that vegetables had souls (it was the sixties). He has a strange, complex mind that grasps and hangs on to details ranging from the minutiae of his childhood to cosmic matters, with a staggering amount in between. Dad couldn’t appreciate and nurture Peter’s sensitivity, couldn’t see him as he was. Instead he tried to shame Peter into his own image of stoic independence. Peter gets attached to people and animals. That summer at Ocean House he was always sifting through the sand underneath the beach club dressing rooms looking for money that might have dropped between the wooden slats. When he’d get enough coins he’d add it to his allowance and make a long-distance call back to the house in Greenwich to ask Katie about our family’s six-year-old Dalmatian, Buzz. During one of those calls, he learned that Buzz had been put down without anyone asking us how we felt about it. Peter was deeply affected by this. I could hear him crying himself to sleep in his room next door. I, on the other hand, felt nothing much. Greenwich was, to all intents and purposes, a chapter about to be closed. We were going to be living in the city with Dad and Susan and . . . well, dogs in the city weren’t practical.
Peter, throughout much of his school years, was faced with the taunting of schoolmates, the cruelty of boys toward peers who show signs of vulnerability as a means of proving their own unchallengeable entry into the world of “real men.” It is to Peter’s credit that he rarely caved. I marveled at the extent to which he would, in the face of Dad’s anger, remain
himself, exposing his heart, challenging Dad: “See me for who I am. I will not change in order to make you comfortable.” I, on the other hand, was loath to be anything that would bring on my father’s disapproval—until, at a later age, I realized that if I wanted his attention, disapproval was the best I could hope for.
CHAPTER SEVEN
HUNGER
I had been hungry, all the Years—
My Noon had Come—to dine—
I trembling drew the Table near—
And touched the Curious Wine—
’Twas this on Tables I had seen—
When turning, hungry, Home
I looked in Windows, for the Wealth
I could not hope—for Mine— . . .
. . . .
Nor was I hungry—so I found
That Hunger—was a way
Of persons outside Windows—
The Entering—takes away—
—EMILY DICKINSON, 1862
THE HUNGER BEGAN that beach summer with Susan. That’s when I moved “outside” myself full-time, and a perpetual, low-grade anxiety took up residence in the newly empty inside space. I didn’t know where the anxiety came from, I just thought that was how life felt for a girl once she’d hit the you’re-supposed-to-be-feminine age—feeling like an outsider, nose pressed against windows, hungry to get in, not knowing that it was myself I was outside of; but then, how could I be inside myself when I had discovered I was not perfect? Who’d want to be inside something imperfect? Before that summer, at age thirteen, the concept of “perfect” hadn’t yet begun to darken my horizon—I was too busy climbing trees and wrestling. Now, on it came.
My feelings of imperfection centered on my body. It became my personal Armageddon, the outward proof of my badness: I wasn’t thin enough. Thinking back, I am sure my mother’s suicide had a role to play; after all, being superthin is a way to postpone womanliness, to put off victimhood: freedom through androgyny. Then, too, Mother had had ample obsessions of her own with body image. Certainly the fashion industry has a role to play in glorifying the emaciated-as-chic look, pushing thin down the throats of young girls just starting to work out their identities. But my father was implicated as well. Dad had an obsession with women being thin. The Fonda cousins have told me that this was true of all the men in the family, going back generations. On his deathbed, Douw Fonda asked his daughter Cindy, “Have you lost weight yet?” (She wasn’t fat.) Eating disorders abound in Fonda women, and at least two of Dad’s five wives suffered from bulimia. Once I hit adolescence, the only time my father ever referred to how I looked was when he thought I was too fat. Then it was always his wife who would be sent to let me know he was displeased, that he wanted me to wear a different, less revealing bathing suit, a looser belt, or a longer dress.
The truth is that I was never fat. But that wasn’t what mattered. For a girl trying to please others, what mattered was how I saw myself—how I’d learned to see myself: through others’ judgmental, objectifying eyes.
Maria Cooper Janis, a friend from childhood, told me once that when she was around age sixteen, she and her parents, Rocky and Gary Cooper, had come to our Malibu beach house for lunch. Apparently, while we were sitting on the beach, my father said to Rocky, “Jane’s got the body, but Maria’s got the face.” I was stunned when Maria told me this, partly because her mother had repeated it to her, but mostly because it showed how judgmental Dad was—and willing to objectify me—even to other people.
Obviously the trouble is that wanting to be perfect is to want the impossible. We’re mortal, after all; we’re not meant to be perfect. Perfect is for God: Completion, as Carl Jung said, is what we humans should strive for. But completion (wholeness) isn’t possible until we stop trying to be perfect. The tyranny of perfection forced me to confuse spiritual hunger with physical hunger.* 1 This toxic striving for perfection is a female thing. How many men obsess about being perfect? For men, generally, good enough is good enough.
Dad had decided that Peter and I should go to boarding school, as was common at the time for families who could afford it. Peter was enrolled at the Fay School for boys in Massachusetts and I at the Emma Willard School in Troy, New York. Starting my freshman year at Emma Willard, being very thin assumed dominance over good hair in the hierarchy of what really mattered.
I remember cutting out a magazine ad that said with $2 and some box tops they would send you a special kind of gum that had tapeworm eggs in it and when you chewed it the worms would hatch and eat up all the food you consumed. It sounded like a splendid idea to me—a way to have your cake and eat it, too, so to speak. I sent in my $2 and the box tops, but the gum never materialized. When I told this story to a friend recently, she said, “You’re a smart girl, Jane. How did you get duped into believing this and sending in the money?” Because I was thirteen (hence immortal) and health wasn’t a factor if it meant getting thin. I knew tapeworms weren’t fatal. If it had been a bubonic virus I was sending away for, I’d have thought twice—maybe. But anything that would allow me to get thin without having to do something active seemed attractive. Mind you, I wasn’t as extreme as a few other girls, who had to be hospitalized because they refused to eat, but I prided myself on being one of the thinnest in the class.
Then, in sophomore year, Carol Bentley, a wet-eyed brunette from Toledo, Ohio, entered Emma Willard and became my best friend. I remember first seeing her as I was stepping out of the dorm shower. She was naked and took my breath away. I had never seen a body like hers: fully developed breasts that stood straight out over a tiny waist, and narrow hips with long, chiseled legs like Susan’s. I felt certain right then that she would end up running the world and that if I hung around long enough, some of her power would rub off on me. Already I had learned to equate the perfection of a woman’s body with power and success.
Carol Bentley and me on graduation day at Emma Willard, 1955.
Perfect body notwithstanding, Carol joined me in having major body-image issues. It was she who introduced me to bingeing and purging, what we now know as bulimia. She said the idea came to her in a class on the history of the Roman Empire. She read that the Romans would gorge themselves on food during orgiastic feasts and then put their fingers down their throats to make themselves throw it all back up and start over again. The idea of being able to eat the most fattening foods and never having to pay the consequences was very appealing.
We would binge and purge only before school dances or just before we were going home for the holidays, and then we would ferret away all the chocolate brownies and ice cream we could get and gobble it up until our stomachs were swollen as though we were five months pregnant. Then we would put our fingers down our throats and make ourselves throw it all up. We assumed that we were the first people since the Romans to do this; it was our secret, and it created a titillating bond between us.
Later it became ritualistic, with specific requirements: I had to be alone (it is a disease of aloneness) and dressed in loose, comfortable clothing. In a catatonic state, I would enter a grocery store to buy the requisite comfort foods, starting with ice cream and moving to breads and pastries—just this one last time. My breathing would become rapid (as in sex) and shallow (as in fear). Before eating, I would drink milk, because if that went into me first, it would help bring up all the rest later. The eating itself was exciting and my heart would pound. But once the food had been devoured, I would be overcome with an urgent need to separate myself from it before it took up residence inside me. Nothing could have stood in the way of my getting rid of it, differentiating myself from it—from the toxic bulk that had seemed so like a mother’s nurture in the beginning—because if it remained within me, I knew that my life would be snuffed out. Afterward I would collapse into bed and sink into a numbed sleep. Tomorrow will be different. It never was.
What an illusion that there were no consequences to be paid! It was years before I allowed myself to acknowledge the addictive, damaging nature of what I was doing. Like alcoholism
, anorexia and bulimia are diseases of denial. You fool yourself into believing you are on top of it and can stop anytime you want. Even when I discovered I couldn’t stop, I still didn’t think of it as an addiction; rather, it was proof that I was weak and worthless. This seems utterly preposterous to me now, but self-blame is part of the sickness. For me the disease lasted, in one form or another, from sophomore year in boarding school through two marriages and two children, until I was in my early forties. My husbands never knew, nor did my children or any of my friends and colleagues.
Unlike alcoholism, bulimia is easy to hide (except from mothers or friends who have also suffered from the disease). Like most people with eating disorders, I was adept at keeping my disease hidden, because I didn’t want anyone to stop me. I was convinced that I was in control anyway and could stop tomorrow if I really wanted to. I was often tired, irritable, hostile, and sick from this, but my willpower to maintain appearances was such that most of the time no one knew the true reasons behind it.
