My Life So Far (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  In There Was a Little Girl, my first Broadway play.

  (Leonard McCombe/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

  As Kitty Twist with Laurence Harvey in Walk on the Wild Side.

  (William Read Woodfield/CPi)

  Our final week of out-of-town tryouts was spent in Philadelphia. Three days in, Josh returned to us as though nothing had happened, though the way in which his wife, Nedda, clung to his side made it plain to me that something was wrong. My hotel room was next to theirs, and one night when I was getting ready for bed, I heard murmuring and decided I wanted to listen in. So I borrowed a trick I’d learned from a boyfriend: If you turn a glass upside down against a wall, it acts like a megaphone and you can hear what’s being said on the other side. That first night I was astonished to hear Nedda singing “Rock-a-Bye, Baby” to Josh. I was too frightened of what lay in store for me when we opened in New York to feel compassion for Josh’s illness. It only underscored how out on a limb by myself I was. The following night I again used the glass trick to eavesdrop, and this time I heard something that disturbed me far more than the lullaby: Josh was talking to someone about the necessity of keeping the play going for at least twenty-one days no matter how bad the New York reviews were, so that he could declare a tax write-off.

  He knows that the play is going to be crucified, and he cares more about a tax write-off than he does about protecting our professional reputations!

  My heart sank. While the Boston and Philadelphia reviews hadn’t been encouraging, to say the least, I had personally received some good notices and had, in desperate hope, managed to convince myself that Josh and Dan Taradash would come through with the right script changes. Now I knew they weren’t even going to try. A tax write-off! What about Lee Strasberg’s vision of theater as high art? What about idealism?

  There Was a Little Girl limped onto Broadway. I got through an embarrassing opening night and learned how to make it through Sardi’s without falling apart when reviews are crucifying, though some reviews were good to me. Brooks Atkinson, in The New York Times, wrote, “As the wretched heroine of an unsavory melodrama, she gives an alert, many-sided performance that is professionally mature and suggests that she has found a career that suits her.” John Chapman, in the New York Daily News, wrote, “With the budding talent that she displayed last evening, she might become the Sarah Bernhardt of 1990. But she’d better find herself a more genuine play than this one between now and then.”

  The play lasted sixteen performances. Josh got his tax write-off, and I emerged with the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for “the most promising actress of the year for drama.”

  I felt like a double exposure: There was the me people could see—my mouth opened and closed and words came out. I’ll never forget an audition I did for Elia Kazan for the female lead in Splendor in the Grass. Kazan, who’d done On the Waterfront and East of Eden, called me down to the edge of the stage, introduced himself, reached up to shake my hand, and asked, “Do you consider yourself ambitious?” I responded immediately with a resounding, “No!” This passive voice flew automatically out of my mouth, muffling my real passions and creativity. The moment the word left my lips I knew I’d made a mistake, I could read it on Kazan’s face. If I wasn’t ambitious, I must not have any fire inside, I must be a dilettante. But good girls aren’t supposed to be ambitious. I went through the motions of an audition but knew I’d already lost out. Natalie Wood got the role, starring opposite Warren Beatty. Neither of them would have hesitated in answering “Yes!” to Kazan’s question.

  I was utterly disembodied. Even my voice, both professionally and in my personal life, was high in the top of my head. The other, not high-voiced, double-exposured me was almost a stranger, someone I was with when I was alone and had nothing to prove, but not someone I could bring to the party. Like an unused muscle, that other me began to atrophy over time so that I almost forgot she was there and was bewildered when someone seemed to see her and expect more from me than I was giving or that I thought myself capable of. Not taking myself seriously, I gave myself away—to films that weren’t very good and to people I didn’t really care about.

  In the fall of 1960, just as I opened in my second Broadway play, Arthur Laurents’s Invitation to a March, Brooke Hayward’s sister, Bridget, was found dead, an apparent suicide, in her New York apartment. The darkness that had overtaken Brooke’s golden, laughing family was frightening. It meant that no one was safe; anything could reach in and pluck you from the light.

  Around the same time, I discovered that Josh was about to sell my contract to producer Ray Stark for $250,000. I didn’t want to be “owned” anymore, so I offered to buy back my contract for the same price he was asking from Stark. While $250,000 may not seem like much in today’s show business, for me (back then) it meant having to work constantly just to be able to turn over a chunk of my paychecks to Josh for five years. But I committed to it without hesitation. Freedom was worth it to me.

  Though I had vowed never to make another Hollywood film, I now needed to work to pay Josh, and when I was offered the role of Kitty Twist in the movie adaptation of Nelson Algren’s dark, Depression-era novel Walk on the Wild Side, I grabbed it. It wasn’t just for the money, however. I wanted to play the brash, train-hopping, petty thief who had just escaped from reform school and ends up a high-class prostitute in a New Orleans brothel. Kitty was about as far a cry from my role in Tall Story as I could get. What’s more, there were other stars to take major responsibility for the film’s success or failure: Barbara Stanwyck, Laurence Harvey, Anne Baxter, and Capucine.

  This time out I had decided to borrow a page from Marilyn Monroe’s book and bring an acting coach to Hollywood with me so I wouldn’t feel so vulnerable. He was a flamboyant Greek actor and coach named Andréas Voutsinas, and we had gotten to know each other when he helped me with the scene that got me into the Actors Studio. After Walk on the Wild Side, he worked with me on the films Period of Adjustment and In the Cool of the Day, and directed me in a Broadway play, The Fun Couple.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  VADIM

  Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails.

  Explore. Dream. Discover.

  —MARK TWAIN

  “Qui ne risque rien n’a rien,” observed the devil, lapsing into French, as is his wont.

  —MARY MCCARTHY,

  Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

  IT WAS 1963. I was in Hollywood filming Sunday in New York, my sixth movie, when I got a call from my agent telling me that Roger Vadim wanted me to come to France to do a remake of La Ronde, the minor movie classic from the fifties. I had my agent fire back a telegram saying that I “would never work with Vadim!” I had seen his . . . And God Created Woman, and—while I found Brigitte Bardot a fascinating force of nature and recognized that the film represented a new, iconoclastic style of filmmaking—I wasn’t all that impressed with it. Besides, I remembered feeling endangered when we’d met several years earlier at Maxim’s in Paris.

  Dad and Peter visiting me on the set of Sunday in New York.

  (Photofest)

  Paris, 1963.

  (Everett Collection)

  But France seemed to be in the cards, because shortly thereafter French director René Clément flew to Los Angeles to pitch me a film idea that would co-star Alain Delon, one of the top male box-office stars in Europe at the time. I agreed. I liked the idea of putting an ocean’s distance between me, Hollywood, and my father’s long shadow. Moreover, France was then at the apex of the nouvelle vague, with young directors like Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, and Malle, and Vadim. Clément was up in years and wasn’t part of this new wave, but he had directed the brilliant Forbidden Games.

  On my second trip to Paris in the fall of 1963, it was love at first sight all over again. But this time the city felt like a friend ready to t
each me the art of living rather than a big party from which I was excluded. You’d have thought I was a long-lost daughter coming home, so effusive was the French press. The person who took me under her wing and made me feel at home in Paris was the reknowned French actor Simone Signoret: Simone, with her charming lisp, sensual bee-stung lips, and heavy-lidded blue eyes—tough, opinionated, always insisting on being a human first, a star second. She lived with her actor-singer husband, Yves Montand, in an apartment above Restaurant Paul on Ile de la Cité, the little triangle of an island in the Seine right across from my hotel. They were good friends with the director Costa-Gavras, who coincidentally was the assistant director on Les Félins, my Clément film. He would later direct the great political thrillers Z, State of Siege, and Missing, and was often there among Simone and Yves’s friends when they ordered up meals from Restaurant Paul and talked heatedly into the night. The stimulating, we’re-not-in-a- hurry-to-get- anywhere, what-could-be- more-perfect-than- talking atmosphere was reminiscent of the Strasberg home in New York, where both Yves and Simone had often visited. Besides good food and wine, the French love all things cerebral. After all, “I think, therefore I am” was said by French philosopher René Descartes.

  I had met Simone in 1959, when she’d accompanied Yves to New York, where his one-man show, An Evening with Yves Montand, was a smash hit on Broadway. My father, Afdera, and I had had dinner together with them at the Algonquin Hotel. I remember watching Simone stare adoringly across the table at my father, and now, in Paris, she talked to me about the films he’d made—Blockade, The Grapes of Wrath, Young Mr. Lincoln, and 12 Angry Men. She said it was the values those films represented, the quality of the characters he played, that moved her so much, and I began to appreciate him in new ways. While he didn’t always bring the qualities she admired home with him, I was old enough now to understand that there are many kinds of needs: Children need loving parents, and people need heroes they can aspire to. Perhaps it’s hard to be a hero and a father. For the world, Dad was Tom Joad.

  I began to realize that the enthusiasm with which France embraced me wasn’t only because I was an American actress, or even because I was the daughter of an American movie star, but because I was the child of Henry Fonda, who embodied the best of America to them—the same America President Kennedy represented. I had come to France hoping to shed the “father’s daughter” identity, only to discover that there was a lot of his identity I was proud of and wanted to be associated with.

  Until coming to France, I had never been exposed to people who took an intellectual approach to filmmaking, nor had I really appreciated the effect American films had on European filmmakers, from the physical antics of Jerry Lewis’s comedies to the works of John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and Preston Sturges.

  It was in France that I made an acquaintance with small-c communism, and since over the years I have been accused of being a Communist by those who want to discredit me, I want to say something about this. As I got to know Simone and Yves, I learned that they were among France’s intellectual Left, which included the other Simone (de Beauvoir), and her longtime companion, Jean-Paul Sartre, and of course Albert Camus, who had died in 1960. All of them were engagé, committed to activism, and in sympathy with the French Communist Party (PCF)—some joining it, then leaving; others never actually becoming party members. Simone and Yves had never joined, although they agreed with many of the party’s opinions. What they and other French artists abhorred was the party’s doctrinaire cultural policies, which held that artistic freedom was a petit bourgeois crime. Still, there was a long history of close ties between the French intellectual and artistic community and the PCF. They viewed the PCF as the party of change, and since the time of the French Revolution, when they had played a powerful role in toppling the monarchy, French intellectuals had always seen themselves as agents of progressive social change. They also tended to be distrustful of NATO, nuclear armament, and the new war that the United States was pretending not to be involved with—in Vietnam. Many of the French intelligentsia had been at the forefront of the movement against their own country’s colonial war in Vietnam, had been active in the underground Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France, and had seen the Communist Party as the only viable way to counteract Fascism.

  Having grown up with our two-party system in America, I was stunned as I learned about the many French political parties, some large and powerful, some small, many coming into being in response to a particular crisis and then disappearing or morphing into some new party. The Communist Party was one among about six other legal political parties represented in the French parliament. I remember reading somewhere that during the time I lived in France, in the fifties and sixties, nearly 40 percent of the French people voted Communist. Communists were simply part of the complex French scene and didn’t seem especially threatening. I was not politically active then and especially not interested in theory or ideology (still not, to this day), and no one suggested I should be; no one proselytized. But I think this long, up-close-and-personal (nontoxic) brush with European communism is why, later, when I did become engagé, as Simone called it, I didn’t view it with the same phobic dread as did many other Americans. As I saw it, when given a choice, people tended to keep a balance between a free market capitalist system and one that had more centralized control—“choice” being the operative word.

  Oddly enough, living in Paris, I felt more American than ever before. I needed to get outside my own country to fully appreciate how different we are and what it means to be a citizen of the United States. In France (and, as I later realized, in other European countries) class differences are more entrenched. There is a marked difference between the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy, and the proletariat (working class), and rarely do class lines get crossed. Birth is destiny. In the United States there is more class fluidity, which was especially true in the 1950s. While today in America a growing U.S. hereditary elite and severe economic disparities make it less likely, it was more or less taken for granted back then that a person from a modest background could compose his or her own life scenario, at least given good health, an encouraging parent, an education, and a little luck. This fluidity, which exists alongside our unique political stability, is I think what makes for our particular energy and optimism. Would that all Americans could have had the opportunity to look back at their country from across the ocean in the early 1960s.

  It was a magical time to be an American in France. During the Eisenhower presidency, the French had thought of us as gauche, too loud, too styleless: “ugly Americans.” Now, with Kennedy and Jackie in the White House, everything seemed to have changed. The Kennedys brought us international esteem, and the Americans in Paris benefited from their popularity.

  On November 22, I walked into the lobby of my hotel after a day’s shooting on the Clément movie. Standing at the reception desk, telephone to his ear, was American actor Keir Dullea. His face was ashen. “Kennedy’s been shot, they think he’s dead,” he told me. We stared at each other. I sat in the lobby, stunned, waiting to hear more news. A journalist came in to interview me for the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma and asked if I wanted to cancel. “No,” I said. “I need to talk.”

  We went up to my hotel room, and after making a desultory attempt at conducting an interview, we both broke down.

  Simone called. She was crying and said that I shouldn’t be alone on this night, that she wanted me to come over to their place. Sitting with Simone, Yves, and their friends that night, I realized that they mourned the loss of Kennedy as their own and shared a sense of terrible, unbelievable finality. For me a bubble had burst. The institutional world I grew up believing in was no longer stable. And it would get worse: The losses of Bobby and Martin were still to come.

  I had come to France for work, yet I had been drawn there for more personal reasons. Maybe here I could begin to hear the sounds of my own voice, try to find out who I was, or at the very least find a more interesting persona t
han the one I inevitably slipped into back home.

  I would end up staying in France six years. And at the hands of a man who was a master at polishing a woman’s persona, I would start down a new path—as a female impersonator.

  Our arms were linked as we solemnly followed his casket through the narrow, ochre-tinted streets of old Saint Tropez—Brigitte Bardot, Annette Stroyberg, Catherine Schneider, Marie-Christine Barrault, and me. Of all Vadim’s wives and companions, only Catherine Deneuve and Ann Biderman were missing. Our thirty-one-year-old daughter, Vanessa Vadim, carrying her infant son, Malcolm, and her half brother, Vania (Vadim’s son with Catherine Schneider), walked just in front of us. The streets were lined ten deep with fans, old friends, and onlookers who had come to pay their respects. It was two months into the new millennium.

  At Vadim’s funeral: Brigitte Bardot, Annette Stroyberg, me, Catherine Schneider, and Marie-Christine Barrault in the foreground, out of focus.

  (Nebinger/Niviere/Hadj/Niko/SIPA Press)

  The services in the small Episcopal church had been arranged by Catherine Schneider, whom he’d married after me. A Scottish minister, in a thick brogue, solemnly gave the sermon in French. An odd amalgam it was. Vadim’s widow Marie-Christine Barrault, niece of fabled French actor Jean-Louis Barrault and the star of such films as Cousin, Cousine, was speaking of Vadim with the theatrics of high Greek tragedy when she was loudly interrupted by an unusually long fart, issuing forth from grandson Malcolm, bringing laughter to the assembled crowd, something Vadim would have appreciated. He was never one to shun laughter, especially if it meant interrupting a solemn occasion.