My Life So Far (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  When filming on Barbarella finished in the fall of 1967, it occurred to me that perhaps I could quiet the malaise and fill the empty place that seemed to be growing larger by having a baby. Make it better.

  One of the things I liked most about Vadim was how he was as a father. Perhaps it was due to the fact that he’d never entirely grown up himself that he seemed able to inhabit a child’s world. His lack of concern about punctuality and the doing of duties served him well when it came to his little children. Every night, after I’d badgered Nathalie into brushing her teeth and going to bed, Vadim would pick up the thread of some phantasmagoric tale he’d have concocted for her. Sometimes the story would go on for weeks. Usually there was an element of science fiction, always of whimsy, with little people turning out to have wondrous big powers. Besides his stories, there were his paintings: Vadim had a unique painting style—primitive, colorful, sensual, in many ways the drawings of a child. Then there was his patience and his generosity with his time—two elements critical to good parenting: Vadim could spend hours debating with his children the origins of the universe, life after death, the meaning of gravity, the whys and wherefores of life, all with a charm and attention that moved me deeply. He was totally present, at least for his girls, at least when they were little. Come to think of it, it was always true for our Vanessa, too.

  Like many people who feel their marriage dissolving, I thought that if I had a child, it would bring us closer. But the desire for a baby wasn’t only to save a troubled marriage, it was a way to save me. I thought that the experience of childbirth would somehow make me right, that the pain of natural childbirth would deliver me to myself. I still saw myself as deeply flawed, unable to open my heart and love enough to be truly happy.

  Vadim thought that having a baby was a splendid idea, so I had my IUD removed, and a month later, during Christmas vacation in Megève, a ski resort in the French Alps—a week after my thirtieth birthday, on December 28, 1967, to be exact—I conceived. I knew the moment it happened and told him so—there was a different resonance to our lovemaking.

  I had a whole round year ahead of me with no commitments except to complete work on our farm, which included planting a garden and a forest. Though I have no conscious memory of my father transplanting the huge pines and fruit trees he brought onto our Tigertail property in the forties, I’m told that he did. I’ll wager that way back then is when I got bitten by the tree-transplanting bug that is a trademark of mine. I’m not big on jewelry or fashion, but big trees—now, that’s something I’ll spend money on. I justify it now by pointing out that I’m too old for saplings.

  I decided I wanted some very large hardwood trees in our front yard, maples, poplars, birch, catalpa, liquidambars. So I drove all over France to the largest nurseries with the tallest trees I could buy, so tall that they had to be transported at night and telephone lines had to be taken down to let them pass. A friend had given us her car, a 1937 Panhard Levasseur, a real collector’s item—but since it no longer ran, I had a welder cut it in half and then solder it together around a newly planted plantain tree so that the tree was growing right through the car—a piece of yard sculpture.

  It was in one of the nurseries, searching for trees, that I felt the first wave of nausea. It stopped me in my tracks. I knew exactly what it meant. I didn’t need a pregnancy test to tell me. I broke into a cold sweat, returned to my car to sit down—and was overcome by a sense of dread! I felt I had to muster all my forces against an unknown terror that seemed to have invaded me. Why? I wanted this! Then tears came, then racking sobs. What is happening? This isn’t how I’m supposed to feel!

  And then I knew: The pregnancy was incontrovertible proof that I was actually a woman—which meant “victim,” which meant that I would be destroyed, like my mother. It was one of those strange moments when I was feeling what I was feeling while simultaneously standing outside of myself analyzing the feeling—and being shocked by what it meant.

  A month or more into the pregnancy, I began to bleed and was told I couldn’t leave my bed for at least a month if I wanted to prevent miscarriage; I was given DES (diethylstilbestrol) to prevent miscarriage, a drug that has subsequently been linked to uterine cancer in daughters of mothers who’ve taken it. Then I came down with the mumps.

  I saw these problems as a powerful sign that I was not meant to be a mother, and they provided me with a reasonable justification for backing out of the whole thing. Yet when my French gynecologist recommended I have an abortion because of the risk mumps posed to the fetus, I never for a moment considered that as an option (though I was grateful I had the choice). It’s not that Vadim and I weren’t concerned. But my attachment to motherhood was so tenuous that I felt if I aborted the fetus, I would never want to have another baby. It was a low point in my life, let me tell you: I had just turned thirty and was pregnant, bedridden, and risking a miscarriage; mumps had swollen my face to the size of a bowling ball; and to top off my misery, across the ocean Faye Dunaway had just created a sensation in Bonnie and Clyde. Not that I was competitive or anything.

  I had just entered my second act, and as far as I could tell, my life had peaked and was on the decline.

  I was always at meetings.

  My mug shot.

  (AP/Wide World Photos)

  Rita Martinson, Donald Sutherland, and me during the FTA show.

  Talking . . . always talking to end the war.

  At Laurel Springs with Tom, Troy, Vanessa, and her dog, Manila.

  (© Steve Schapiro)

  The night Tom won his race for the assembly. Left to right: Margot Kidder, Tom, me, Shirlee.

  (Barry E. Levine)

  The Workout.

  (Harry Langdon)

  At the Oscars with Ted. At this point, he’s the one in show business.

  (Michel Bourquard/Stills/Retna Ltd.)

  Surveying the bison on Ted’s ranch.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1968

  If a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, it might produce a tornado in Texas. Unlikely as it seems, the tiny currents that a butterfly creates travel across thousands of miles, jostling other breezes as they go and eventually changing the weather.

  —EDWARD LORENZ

  OKAY, SO I WAS WRONG. My life didn’t peak, nor was it on the decline. But like everything else in the world, it was about to go through major changes. Looking back, I believe it now seems fated that I began my second act in 1968, perhaps the most turbulent, tumultuous year of the century. I was thirty, pregnant, and ripe. Everything in me was poised, like a sprinter at the starting line, twitching to move forward.

  Things had been brewing for a while: I needed to make sense of life and feel I had a purpose. Filming Barbarella at a time when so much substantive change was taking place in the world had acted as yeast to my malaise. Who was I? What did I want from life? I am carrying life—what does this mean for me?

  Change always holds an element of self-interest, and mine was quite simply that I wanted to be a better person. To switch to a gardening metaphor, it’s possible that the seeds of my definition of “better” were gathered and planted way back when I saw my father’s early movies: The Grapes of Wrath, The Ox-Bow Incident, Young Mr. Lincoln. Stratified after thirty years, they were now waiting to sprout. My pregnancy during that fertile year—1968—created a rich loam.

  At first the evidence offered by my pregnancy (that I was a woman, hence like my mother) had struck terror in my heart, but as time went by, the fear gave way to a strange peace. Peace was not something with which I was familiar. Perhaps the hormones of pregnancy were washing away my lifelong tendency to depression. But I think it was more than that. I believe that in facing and naming the terror I had felt at the start of my pregnancy, a healing process had been set in motion—a somatic realization that I was, in fact, a normal female. My always troublesome “down there” was doing what millennia of women’s down theres had done for them. I had conceived. In a way, I was pregnant with a baby and also wit
h myself, connected by a primordial umbilical cord to other women—to all women past, present, and future; to the female spirit—interested in and needing to be with women more than men for the first time since adolescence. In fact, during my nine months of pregnancy I experienced being in my body for the first time since preadolescent girlhood. I would not be capable of sustaining that embodiment after pregnancy, but I would find it again later, in my third act.

  I had never gone in much for watching television and was not one of the many Americans witnessing the developing Vietnam War from their living rooms. What attention I did give to it allowed me to remain comfortable in the belief that it was an acceptable cause—maybe not a “good war” like the one my father fought in; more of a fuzzy one, like the Korean War. But all that changed when the risk of miscarriage confined me to bed for the first three months of 1968. I saw images on French television showing damage caused by American bombers that, en route back to their aircraft carriers, unloaded bombs they hadn’t already dropped, sometimes hitting schools, hospitals, and churches. I was stunned.

  Then, beginning in January during the celebration of Tet, Vietnam’s new year, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong launched a series of well-coordinated offensives in major cities throughout South Vietnam. It was shocking. For this to have been organized and carried out without the U.S. military and our allies having even a hint meant that the people we were calling the enemy was just about everybody. As I watched the Vietcong storm the grounds of the American embassy, it occurred to me that Vietnamese residents throughout Saigon must have participated: shopkeepers, peddlers, farmers, laundresses. Later it was discovered that guns, ammunition, and grenades had been smuggled into the city in laundry and flower baskets. The words of General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, claiming that he was close to ending the war, that he could see “a light at the end of the tunnel,” echoed grotesquely in light of what we were seeing on television. We, supposedly the mightiest military force in the world, had so lost ground that even after four years of warfare the enemy was able to attack us in our own embassy.

  The psychological impact of such images was devastating. Everything was turned upside down. Who was strong? What did “military might” mean? Who were we as Americans? As I lay in bed contemplating what I was seeing, I remembered a morning in Saint Tropez. Vadim and I were having a leisurely breakfast on the balcony of our room at the Tahiti Hôtel when he opened the newspaper.

  “Ce n’est pas possible! Mais ils sont fous ou quoi?” he exploded, jabbing his fingers at the front page. “Look at this. Your Congress must be out of their minds!” It was August 8, 1964, and French headlines blasted the news that Congress had just passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It gave President Johnson the power, for the first time ever, to bomb North Vietnam.

  “There’s no way you can win a war in Vietnam!” Vadim continued with uncharacteristic passion.

  I wanted to ask, “Where is Vietnam?” but I was too ashamed. I also wondered why he was so certain the United States couldn’t win, and I felt defensive. Sour grapes, I thought. Just because the French lost . . .

  Now, with the grim reality of 1968 and the Tet offensive, it occurred to me that Vadim may have been right. But how could the United States lose to a country so small? And if a French filmmaker had known in 1964 that we couldn’t win, why did the American government fail to get it? It would take me four more years before I really understood why Vadim had been so certain, and a few years after that to begin to grasp the most disturbing question of all: why five administrations, from Truman to Nixon, did see that we couldn’t win and persisted anyway.

  When the danger of miscarriage had passed, my sometime mentor Simone Signoret brought me with her to a huge antiwar rally in Paris. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were among the speakers. For the first time I felt embarrassed for my country, and I also wanted to go home. It was too painful being in France, hearing the criticisms, and not doing anything.

  But what to do? I didn’t like criticizing America while I was in another country. I’m not a dabbler. If I was going to oppose the war, it would be in the streets of America with my fellow countrymen, who, I could see on French television, were marching in growing numbers in the States. The dilemma for me was that this could never happen in the context of my marriage to Vadim. (In years to come, he would publicly disparage me as a “Jane of Arc.”) While personally opposed to the Vietnam War, he was too cynical to commit himself to any movement to end it. Then, too, I knew that if I threw myself heart and soul into the antiwar effort, a return to the permissive, indolent life I shared with Vadim would be unthinkable.

  Around this time I had an experience that, oddly enough, would never have happened had my beloved former stepmother Susan not come to Paris to check up on me during my pregnancy. At dinner one evening, a friend of hers introduced me to a nineteen-year-old fresh-faced kid named Dick Perrin, who turned out to be a U.S. Army resister from the First Battalion of the Sixty-fourth Armored Brigade, stationed in West Germany. This was my first encounter with a U.S. serviceman who was actively opposed to the war, and it was my introduction to what within two years would become a major focus of my activism: GIs against the war.

  Dick talked to us about an organization he and other American army resisters had just formed, RITA (Resisters Inside the Army). RITA’s goals were to spread anti–Vietnam War messages within the armed forces. Dick said that a soldier had the right, even the obligation, to dissociate himself from the military if he believed the war was wrong.

  It seemed there was a growing underground network of American resisters and conscientious objectors in Europe. They were seeking employment and financial assistance. According to Dick in his book G.I. Resister, one of the “hideouts” for these resisters was a farmhouse southwest of Paris, near Tours. There Dick would drop off or pick up guys. He described how they sat at a fourteen-foot-long kitchen table where they could all eat together with the owner of the farm. This owner was a big, gentle American in bib overalls. Dick called him Sandy. Dick would gaze out the window onto the rolling farmland and see “crazy constructions that swung in the breeze and moved in nearly every direction.” Dick said, “I had no name for them because I had never seen a mobile before, nor even heard of one.”

  Only later, sitting with his family in Canada watching “Sandy’s” obituary being announced, did Perrin discover that their benefactor was none other than the great American sculptor Alexander Calder.

  I had often been at that farmhouse with Sandy and his wife, but he never told me they were helping resisters, and I had never met one there.

  After that dinner I saw Dick Perrin and several other GI resisters from time to time, helping them get dental care, passing on some of Vadim’s clothes. I even invited them to a sneak screening of Barbarella, which would be released later that year. The young men with Dick described themselves as humanitarian rather than political and told how soldiers returning from Vietnam had joked about torturing Vietnamese prisoners. Yet, like me, they became defensive whenever a French person expressed criticism of America. At one of our encounters Dick gave me a book, The Village of Ben Suc, by Jonathan Schell. “Read this,” he said, “and you’ll understand.” I went back to our farm and devoured the short book in one stunned sitting.

  In it Schell described what happened in January 1967 during the largest U.S. military operation in Vietnam up to that time, Operation Cedar Falls. Having failed in its previous attempts to “pacify” the village of Ben Suc and the surrounding area known as the Iron Triangle, the American High Command had developed a new strategy: to bomb (including with B-52s) and shell the area for several days; then bring in ground troops, both American and our South Vietnamese allies from the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, to round up villagers and move them in trucks to a refugee camp. Bulldozers then leveled the village and the surrounding jungle, which was bombed again until no trace was left of what had once been a relatively prosperous farming village.

&
nbsp; Perhaps it was the matter-of-factness of Schell’s writing that made it so powerful. We learn with him how embedded the Vietcong were in the life of the village, providing a full governmental structure and protections and involving everyone in their programs; how the captive villagers deliberately allowed the American soldiers to continue in their belief that the VC were a “roving band of guerrillas” who occasionally appeared out of the jungle and then disappeared again, rather than the governing body they clearly were. The reader comes to understand why the goal of “winning the hearts and minds” of refugees from Ben Suc was a grotesque joke. Schell quotes American lieutenant colonel Kenneth J. White, province representative for the Office of Civilian Operations, exclaiming as he looks at the resettlement camp for the first time, “This is wonderful! I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s the best civilian project I’ve ever seen . . . you know, sometimes it just feels right.”

  I was shocked at Schell’s account of the smugness of the high-level U.S. military officers who seemed to revel in Operation Cedar Falls’ massive military destructiveness without seeming to consider the effects on civilians. In response to a question from Schell about civilian casualties of the bombing, one sergeant said, “What does it matter? They’re all Vietnamese.”

  I closed the book. I knew that something fundamental in the general area of my heart had exploded and blown me wide open. I’m not sure how I had managed up until then to neatly compartmentalize my generic, liberal opposition to war and avoid knowing more about the realities of this particular one.