My Life So Far (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  Vadim brought Nathalie to visit, but the nurses said they didn’t allow children in the room because they “carried germs,” so Nathalie had to stand outside with her little face pressed against my window peering in.

  As it happened, September 28, Vanessa’s birthday, was also Brigitte Bardot’s birthday. Brigitte had predicted this would be the case and sent me a cabbage with a card that read, “In France, babies are delivered in cabbages, not by the stork.” Some friends came to see me—and they’re the ones who brought me germs, not Nathalie. I got sick and the nurses wouldn’t let me breast-feed for a while, for fear I’d give whatever I had to Vanessa. I liked the feeling of milk coming into my breasts. I liked having breasts! I liked that, for a while, the first thing to go through a doorway wasn’t my nose.

  After several days I was able to get up. I wanted to lose the weight I’d gained in time for the upcoming film, so I started doing ballet pliés in the bathroom. But this caused me to hemorrhage, which meant I had to stay in the hospital for a week, seeing Vanessa only when they’d bring her to me to feed. Stuck in a hospital. Sick, like my mother! I was miserable. I did breast-feed a little, but the nurses were giving Vanessa supplements (without asking me), so it wasn’t altogether successful—which made me feel I was already failing as a mother.

  After a week Vadim came to take us home. There were paparazzi outside the clinic taking pictures, some of which I still have. I am looking down at the baby in my arms, and the uncertainty on my face reflects something that Adrienne Rich wrote in her book about motherhood, Of Woman Born, “Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother . . . when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.”

  A friend had recommended a cockney nanny named Dot Edwards, who had flown in from London and was waiting at the farm when we arrived. She took over the responsibilities of caring for Vanessa, just as nannies had cared for me and my brother. Wasn’t it the way things were done? I went to bed and cried for a month (like my mother), not knowing why. I felt that the floor had dropped out from under me. Vanessa knew it, I swear. She knew something was wrong and would cry whenever she was with me. Dot said it was colic, but I knew better.

  In trying to understand my mother and how her state of mind at my birth might have affected me, I have learned a lot about postpartum depression: how, after the birth of a child, not just the body but the psyche is opened to the reliving of early, unresolved injuries; how these “memories” can penetrate to the deepest psychic fault line, causing profound grief. Perhaps after Vanessa’s birth I was reexperiencing the sadness and aloneness I had felt as an infant. But, of course, nobody knew much of anything about PPD back then, so instead of seeing my depression as a not-so-unusual phenomenon (exacerbated by the horrid forceps), I just felt that I had failed—that nothing was turning out the way it was supposed to, not the birth, not the nursing, not my feelings for my child or (it seemed) hers for me. I don’t know how women with PPD manage to cope when they can’t afford the kind of help I had in Dot. I think this is partly why I would later find myself focusing on working with young, poor mothers and their children.

  Unable to nurse successfully, I gave up and turned to Adelle Davis (the first mainstream health food proponent) for advice about what a baby should drink.

  When Vanessa was three months old we went to Hollywood, where I began preparations for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? I took my baby to a traditional pediatrician in Beverly Hills and told him that I was concerned because she was always throwing up.

  “What formula are you giving her?” the doctor asked.

  “Well, what Adelle Davis recommends,” I answered. “Dessicated baby veal liver, cranberry juice concentrate, yeast, and goat’s milk. Of course we have to make the holes in her bottle larger. . . .”

  He was speechless for a moment, then he broke out laughing.

  I switched to Similac formula, again feeling that I’d failed.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY?

  It is hard work to control the workings of inclination and turn the bent of nature; but that it may be done, I know from experience. God has given us, in a measure, the power to make our own fate.

  —CHARLOTTE BRONTË,

  Jane Eyre

  THE ORIGINAL WRITER/DIRECTOR OF They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? was fired and replaced by a young director named Sydney Pollack, who called to ask if he could come over and discuss the script with me. I remember sitting with Sydney at our house and his asking me what I thought the script problems were and would I read the original book carefully and then talk with him about what was missing in the adaptation. Wonderful Sydney had no idea what this meant to me. Naturally I had discussed script problems with Vadim on the movies we had made together, but this was different. This was a director who was actually seeking my input. It was a germinal moment. I began to study the book in ways I hadn’t before—identifying moments that seemed essential not just to my character but to the movie as a whole, making sure everything I did contributed to the central theme. This was the first time in my life as an actor that I was working on a film about larger societal issues, and instead of my professional work feeling peripheral to life, it felt relevant.

  They Shoot Horses was an existential story that used the marathon dances of the Depression era as a metaphor for the greed and manipulativeness of America’s consumer society. The entire story took place in a ballroom on the Santa Monica Pier, a place that had been a part of my childhood, where marathon dances had actually been held. During the Depression contestants in the marathons, hoping to win prizes, would dance until they literally dropped from exhaustion, while crowds of people sitting on bleachers would cheer their favorite couples and thrill at the sight of dancers collapsing, hallucinating, going crazy—like spectators at the Roman Colosseum watching Christians being thrown to the lions. From time to time there would be a race around the ballroom to wear the contestants down and speed up the eliminations. After several hours the dancers would get a ten-minute rest break, and then they’d go back out on the floor.

  On the Ile de France in 1969. I’m wearing a wig, and Dot is following just behind Vadim.

  (AFP/Getty Images)

  As Gloria in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

  (Photofest)

  Sydney Pollack directing Horses. Behind him, left to right: me, Red Buttons, and Susannah York in the lower-right-hand corner.

  The ballroom had been re-created on a sound stage. Red Buttons would be my partner for several scenes. He and I decided to see what it felt like to dance on the set until we couldn’t stand up, as we would in the movie. We were more or less fine for a day or so, then we got so tired we had to hold each other up as we shuffled around. Neither Red nor I could understand how people had gone on for weeks at a time. After two days I began hallucinating. My face was right up against Red’s cheek, and when I opened my eyes I could see every pore of his skin; I realized that although he was a good deal older than me, his skin was remarkably young.

  When we’d decided we’d had enough, that it was time to go home, I told him how impressed I was with his skin, and he told me it was due to a nutritionist, Dr. Walters, in the San Fernando Valley.

  I promptly made an appointment to see the doctor, who gave me a thorough examination, which included taking samples of my hair and skin. A week or so later he put me on a complicated regimen of vitamin supplements, gave me a lot of little plastic jars to keep them in, and told me to mark each with “B,” “L,” and D,” for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. (I tell you this because those little plastic jars will resurface and get me into a lot of trouble!)

  The film was a turning point for me, both professionally and personally. Sydney, having been an actor himself, is a wonderful actor’s director, and with his guidance I probed deeper into the character and into myself than I had before, and I gained confidence as an actor.

  But as I grew stronger I felt a parallel weakening of my marriage, a growing dissatisfacti
on, and less willingness to swallow the hurt that Vadim’s drinking and gambling—not to mention the threesomes—caused me. But the idea of actually leaving him was still too hard to confront. I didn’t want to be alone. I still felt that it was my relationship with him, however painful, that validated me. What will I be without him? I won’t have any life. I had put so much into creating a life with him, fitting into his life, that I’d left myself behind. But who was “myself”? I wasn’t sure. And now we had this little girl together, and there was Nathalie, and the home I’d created and all those trees I’d planted. In addition to everything else, a divorce felt like such an admission of—yes—failure. And I’d wanted so much to do better than my dad at marriage.

  One day I was driving to the studio and, without noticing, ended up hours to the north, without knowing how I got there. I was having a mini breakdown, I think. Naturally I drew on my real-life anguish for all it was worth to feed my role as Gloria, the suicidal character in the movie who asks her dance partner to shoot her, the way they shoot horses with a broken leg.

  I would spend days and nights living at the studio instead of going home to Malibu, partly because I wanted to enhance my identification with Gloria’s hopelessness and partly because I just didn’t want to go home to Vadim. I had a playpen set up in my dressing room and would have Dot bring Vanessa to me so I could feed her and sing to her. I knew only one lullaby from my own childhood, so I got a record of all the best lullabies and memorized them all. Then I would sing them one after the other to her (she sings them to her children now). In spite of my feelings of failure as a mother, giving birth—and to a girl—made me feel more connected to life and to femaleness in a way that was all my own, not a reflection of my husband. Even my body seemed to fall into a new, more graceful alignment.

  One of the actors on the film was Al Lewis, who’d become famous as Grandpa in The Munsters on television. He would spend hours in my dressing room talking about social issues, and in particular about the Black Panther Party. Marlon Brando had taken up their cause and Al thought that I should, too. I remembered the conversations back in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, while filming Hurry Sundown, when I’d first learned about black militants. Al talked to me about the Panthers who’d been killed in Oakland, how others were being framed and put in jail with unreasonably high bail, and how Brando was helping to raise bail money and get lawyers.

  Dad visiting us in Malibu during Horses. That’s Dot hovering in the background.

  (Bob Willoughby/MPTV.net)

  I listened, storing things up. Making no moves.

  When the filming was over we went to New York, where I found my way to Vadim’s hair stylist in the Village, Paul McGregor. There I had my first deep hair epiphany. Hair had ruled me for many years. Perhaps I used it to hide behind. The men in my life liked it long and blond, and I had been a blonde for so long that I didn’t even know what my own color actually was. I simply said to Paul McGregor, “Do something,” and he did. It was the haircut that became famous in Klute, the shag, and he dyed my hair darker, like what it really was. I didn’t look as if I were trying to imitate Vadim’s other wives anymore—I looked like me! I knew right away that I could do life differently with this hair.

  Vadim sensed immediately that my cutting my hair was the first volley in my move for independence, though he did little more than grumble about it. It was during this time of making They Shoot Horses that director Alan Pakula sent me the script of Klute with a wonderful character named Bree Daniel. I immediately agreed to do it the following year.

  My new haircut and I returned to France with Vadim and Vanessa. There I remained for the good part of a year, swinging with Vanessa in a hammock between two of the large trees I’d planted, trying to be a mother but not really knowing how. Parenting, I discovered, doesn’t necessarily come naturally. I realized much later that I was parenting the way I’d been parented, taking care of all the externals but not countenancing the personhood of my baby. There is one especially powerful memory. It is late at night; I can’t get Vanessa to sleep; I am despondent, again deep into the bulimia; I am lying on my back on the floor, with Vanessa lying on my chest. She lifts her head and looks straight into my eyes for what seems like an eternity. I feel she is looking into my soul, that she knows me, that she is my conscience. I get scared and have to look away. I don’t want to be known.

  I was at the country estate of my best girlfriend, Valarie Lalonde, when this happened. Part American, part British, ten years younger than me, Valarie was fun and smart and had a great giggle. She’d swing in the hammock with Vanessa and me and make Vadim mad because she was very pretty but liked me better than him. We have remained friends all these years, and recently I asked what her memories were of that time. Her first comment was that I was “upstairs a lot.” Yes, of course I was—pretending to be sick so I could have time by myself. In addition, I was still actively bulimic, although no one knew. No one ever knew. It wasn’t difficult to hide—especially since no one was really paying attention: I would simply leave the table, go upstairs, purge whatever I had eaten, and come back down again, all chipper and lively. Since the act of purging is somewhat orgasmic, the chipper part was easy. The difficulty would set in within twenty or thirty minutes, when a precipitous drop in blood sugar would flood me with fatigue and necessitate a physical and emotional withdrawal.

  I watched how every minute of Vanessa’s days seemed filled with discovery, as mine had been when I was little. Time, the most valuable thing of all, where was it going? It was withering away, and I was becoming, not a grape of wrath—grapes are full and juicy. No, I was becoming a raisin of wrath, shriveled on the vine. I had to do something. So I did what I have always tended to do when confused and at a turning point: I go as far away from what’s familiar as possible, in the belief that somehow the miraculous power of strange faces and foreign climes will reveal me to myself, force me to examine how much of my problem I brought with me and how much I can honestly blame on my current context.

  A lot of people who seemed to be on a search for “inner truth” were going to India and coming back with what sounded like answers: Mia Farrow and the Beatles, for instance. So off I went with a small duffel bag to New Delhi.

  I was shocked at what I encountered. Until then poverty was just a word to me. I had never before been to a third-world country. I soon realized that not everyone saw what I was seeing. When I told the young Americans I occasionally ran into how appalled I was by the poverty, they would say that I “just didn’t understand India”; that I was bringing my bourgeois (there it was again) notions to a country where they weren’t applicable; that I was missing the point if I thought the people were miserable; that their religion lifted them above “such things.” Finally I met some Americans who were with the Peace Corps, digging wells, helping out. They understood my reaction—after all, that was why they were there, to help. I briefly considered joining them, but I was almost ten years older than them, and also I couldn’t imagine bringing Vanessa to India while I worked with the Peace Corps.

  Ultimately, in some ways my trip did “reveal me to myself.” It taught me that I wasn’t a hippie; that given a choice, I’d dig wells rather than go to an ashram or space out on dope. Hey, it’s no secret that I’ve smoked pot. I’ve tried most everything that doesn’t require piercing the skin. But except for alcohol, nothing has ever caught on with me. Basically I like life on the natch too much. Besides, it’s not possible to make things better when you’re spaced out.

  I flew directly from New Delhi to Los Angeles, where I was scheduled to promote They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? It was nighttime when I got to the room Vadim had reserved for us at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Talk about a rough transition!

  I woke up in the morning with the cacophony of India still ringing in my ears, the odors of India still in my nose—and when I opened the curtains and looked out the window onto the quiet streets of Beverly Hills, I thought, My God, where is everybody? Has there been a plague? So clean.
So empty. I had to struggle to remember that this was how it had always been, and it had seemed normal back then. But now I looked at the lavishness of the place with new eyes, and I was disturbed. How could we live this way when there were New Delhis in the world?

  By now Vadim and I both knew that the woman who showed up in that hotel room was no longer his wife. I had moved out psychically. And it was for good.

  Marriages end in stages, and it has nothing to do with a piece of paper. Part of mine had ended years earlier, when we weren’t even married yet, but I’d plowed along in deep denial. Denial can be a pathology or a survival mechanism—and sometimes it’s both. I had felt I needed the structure of our marriage to keep me from . . . vaporizing. I am with him, therefore I exist. And the newness of our being together had still permitted passion and romance. Then there was the stage when I’d grown numb and abandoned my body—yet keeping up the routine was the only thing that seemed possible, since the alternative still had me falling down a dark hole. After six years I had begun to see a faint outline of a me without him. This had ushered in a feisty period, when I dipped my toes a few times into the uncertain waters of independence—cutting my hair, going to India, having a romance of my own. (In a rare fit of discretion I won’t name him.) But by the time all this occurred, the marriage to Vadim was no longer emotionally viable, at least not for me. Vadim may have been able to continue with the status quo, but I couldn’t. Yet I discovered that you have to watch out for extramarital romances. You are raw, and he is usually inappropriate. But the relationship can take on an unwarranted and intense place in your lonely heart simply because of its juxtaposition to your marriage. Fifteen years or so later, when Vadim gave me the manuscript of Bardot, Deneuve, Fonda, I was flabbergasted to find that he had portrayed himself as the faithful husband, cuckolded by me at the end of our marriage. I said, “Vadim, come on! How can you write that without saying what you had been doing all during our marriage! You’re being hypocritical!” That did it. For Vadim, being called a hypocrite was almost as bad as being called bourgeois! He did some rewriting on his book, which acknowledged (barely) that he had regularly played around on me—but I was still made to look like the principal transgressor. I found this interesting, since Vadim never admitted to jealousy and would have sworn on his life that he didn’t hold to a double standard.