by Jane Fonda
One day, for instance, we got into a heated argument about Angela Davis, the young black professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, who was a member of the American Communist Party. I said I didn’t think she should have been fired from her teaching job at UCLA because she was a Communist, and he vehemently disagreed. Then he pointed his finger at me and said, “If I ever find out you’re a Communist, Jane, I’ll be the first person to turn you in.”
“But Dad, I am not a Communist!” I shouted as I ran from him into my room and into my bed, the non-Communist Lone Ranger, pulling the sheets up over my head, desperate to blot out what his words implied. He would turn me in? His own child? I knew he had vivid memories of the days of HUAC and how Joseph McCarthy had ruined the lives and careers of people he knew. I knew he was afraid for me. But what about Tom Joad and Clarence Darrow and Abe Lincoln? I couldn’t reconcile the father I thought I knew with the more conservative person I now saw him to be.
I can only imagine the confusion and anguish the changes I was going through must have caused my father, and now I am filled with love for his gruff attempts to remain connected to me, however tenuously. In time I could forgive him for not possessing the more radical courage I wanted him to have. Choosing what characters to play can reveal an aspiration on the part of an actor, not necessarily the actor’s reality.
The march with Native Americans at Fort Lawton near Tacoma, Washington. Janet McCloud is next to me. I was about to be arrested for the first time.
(Richard Heyza/Seattle Times)
Me in the midst of a welfare-rights march in Las Vegas in 1970.
(Bill Ray/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
AN ASIDE
The activism upon which I embarked in 1970 changed me forever in terms of how I saw the world and my place in it. These changes remain to this day at the core of my being, though the way I express them has grown—fortunately, because in those first years back home there was hardly a mistake I didn’t make when it came to public utterances.
I had heard and read things that threw into question everything I believed about my country. But what to do? I didn’t know, but I felt I couldn’t slow down while people’s rights were being violated, while people were being killed, while the war continued. Everything (including my career) had to be put on hold till this was stopped.
Instead of reflection, what I did was talk—all the time, everywhere, on and on and on in a frantic voice tinged with the Ivy League. Press conferences became an almost biweekly occurrence. When I look back over that period I realize that I was not ready for so much antagonistic public exposure. I was angry enough going in because of all that I was learning, and when, increasingly, I felt reporters were coming after me and questioning my motives, I became even more defensive. In interviews I was humorless, talking too fast, in a voice that came from some elitist, out-in-space place, anger seething just beneath the surface. This was when I began to use radical jargon that rang shrill and false. You try to prove what you’re not sure of. I made it easy for the media and others to choose a dubious if not downright hostile lens through which to view me. There I was, up on my soapbox, pronouncing myself a “revolutionary woman,” while Barbarella had just played in a theater around the corner.
In hindsight I should have listened more, talked less, taken it slower. I wish I had taken Vanessa with me on my cross-country travels. It would have been better for her, for me, for us. Shoulda, woulda, coulda. It makes me wince to think about it now.
Watching some taped interviews years later with my son, Troy (to whom I turn when I need support), I wanted to shout, “Will someone please tell her to shut up?” Troy, always a wise and generous soul, said, “Mom, listen, Taoist sages, when they were learning something new, would isolate themselves for a long time, until they had attained enlightenment and could teach. But you”—he shook his head and laughed—“you were out there in public before you had really made those issues your own. Your voice wasn’t even your own. You weren’t a complete person yet. You weren’t you.”
The following is an explanation, and an explanation isn’t an excuse. I have spent a lot of time trying to understand why I did what I did the way I did.
Partly it’s the way I am. My instincts are good, but I am not by nature someone who goes slow. I get the picture quickly, and if something comes into my life and touches me and makes sense to me, I plunge in jusqu’au bout, right to the end. My life has been a series of gigantic leaps of faith, based almost always on intuition and emotion, not on calculation or ego—or ideology. As British playwright David Hare has said of himself, “I’m where I want to be before I can be bothered to go through the dreary business of getting there.”
Then, too, it was the nature of the times. I returned to an America at war with itself in a manner and on a level I had not suspected. There was a visceral sense that everything was ready to blow up, that there could actually be a revolution. Having been in Paris the year before, I knew that it was not inconceivable that students, blacks, workers, and others who felt disenfranchised could bring down their government. What that would mean I hadn’t a clue. That such a thing would (as ultimately it had in France) cause a backlash that might very well end in an even more oppressive state didn’t occur to me. Certainly no one I knew was articulating any clear, more democratic alternative to what we had in the United States.
I wanted to be taken seriously, and I mistakenly thought that the more militant I appeared, the more seriously I’d be taken. I realized only later that my value was in being just who I was—a newcomer on a fast track seeing a lot of things that were rocking the foundations of my belief system; trying to put it all together; and most important, being a movie star whom servicemen and -women were eager to meet and talk to and from whom I was hearing truth I thought other Americans needed to hear.
What I wanted to be was better—and to make it better. I didn’t think enough about how I was being perceived. I was too immersed in what I was learning, in trying to understand, and in day-to-day dramas. I would have gotten into a lot less trouble if I had been more self-conscious, more aware of my image, more concerned about how what I said or did might be interpreted or might affect my career. For better or worse, I still don’t. It wasn’t until On Golden Pond, when I got to know Katharine Hepburn, someone quintessentially conscious of her image, that I was forced to think about the extent to which I have ignored mine.
I wanted to be a repeater, like one of those tall radio transmitters at the tops of mountains that pick up signals too faint in the valleys and transmit them to a broader audience. In retrospect, and having survived to write about it, I don’t regret having plunged in. Had I been more cautious, I might have become just another concerned observer. A character in E. M. Forster’s Howards End says that the truth can be found only by exploring the extremes, and “though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility.”
A persistent assumption about me is that I am a puppet, ready for a new man to pull my strings. There was some truth to this. Until age sixty I never had enough self-confidence to feel validated unless I was with a man, and the men I was with embodied something I felt would make me better than I thought I was. While each relationship did bring me new depth, I invariably ended up feeling: “Something’s missing. This doesn’t feel right anymore.” I would then spend time on my own (though never more than a few years) and begin to identify what it was that was missing—and invariably an extraordinary man would come into my life who seemed to be the One who could help me get there. A puppet has no life without its puppeteer. A Svengali takes his Trilby and molds her into something he wants or needs, regardless of her potential. In my case, when I got into a committed relationship, I was always partway to where I was headed and my partner would help guide me further along on the journey. For me, this realization has been very important. It has shown me that I have always been, at the very least, the co-captain of my ship.
This aside is an attempt to
address some of the controversial things said about me personally. I’ll have more to say later on the subject of the political controversy that has surrounded me. If you haven’t already, fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
CHAPTER FOUR
SNAPSHOTS FROM THE ROAD
There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware
I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound Everybody look what’s going down
—STEPHEN STILLS,
“For What It’s Worth,” 1966
IN APRIL 1970, I went out to explore America. So much was new. This would mark the start of my needing to experience things firsthand. I can read and study, but to really “get it” I need to sit in people’s homes, see their faces, hear their stories directly, find out what their lives are like. I wanted to put real faces to the troubling facts that I’d been hearing during my three first months back in the States—Native American faces, African-American faces, faces of men in uniform, Middle-American faces. Having lived exclusively on the coasts, what lay between was missing for me—a sandwich with no filling. Living in France had made me feel very American. Now I wanted to know what that meant—not just at the fancy edges but at the center, just as I was seeking my own center.
Film director Alan Pakula once said about me, “There seems in her some vast emotional need to find the center of life. Jane is the kind of lady who might have gone across the prairie in a covered wagon one hundred years ago.” Instead I would rent a car and, like a pioneer in reverse, drive east across America.
I set out with Elisabeth Vailland, a friend from France, in a rented station wagon filled to the brim with sleeping bags, cameras, books, my guitar (David Crosby had been giving me lessons), and a cooler for my odd assortment of foods. I was in the anorexic phase of my food addiction, allowing myself only soft-boiled eggs, raw corn on the cob, and spinach. I was anxious that for two months I would not be taking my daily ballet classes—the longest danceless stretch since I was twenty. To compensate, I felt I had to exert rigid control over what I put in my stomach so as not to put on weight.
Almost from the get-go we were swept up in the tumultuous events of 1970—the invasion of Cambodia, the killing of students at Kent State University in Ohio and Jackson State University in Mississippi, and a series of campus uprisings. Certain events from our trip stand out clearly for me, and like snapshots from the road, I will show them to you. But a lot was a blur of drama, danger, and stress. Fortunately both Elisabeth and I kept journals. Less fortunately there are tens of thousands of pages of FBI files on me, which were apparently begun within weeks of my starting the trip (I later obtained these files via the Freedom of Information Act, which was passed post-Watergate).
Elisabeth was handsome in a Georgia O’Keeffe way. In the press she would be described variously as my hairdresser, my public relations manager, and a Russian dancer. Not unexpectedly, there were hints that we were lovers. We weren’t.
Elisabeth and her by then deceased husband, French novelist Roger Vailland, had shared Vadim’s penchant for whiskey and ménages à trois, and Vadim hoped that my respect for their intelligence would validate his own sexual proclivities. In Bardot, Deneuve, Fonda, Vadim wrote about Roger Vailland: “He rejected, with equal rigor, Judeo-Christian puritanism and communist hypocrisy when it came to sex and man’s right to pleasure”—man’s being the operative word. The moral premise that Roger Vailland and Roger Vadim shared was that there could be no true love unless it was free from sexual jealousy and emotional possessiveness. Elisabeth not only was in agreement, but often introduced Roger to women she thought would please him. I had once asked Roger if he would be jealous if Elisabeth slept with another man. “That is absolutely forbidden!” he replied.
Vanessa, the plucky sprite, in front of Dad’s house just as I was leaving for my first cross-country trip with Elisabeth.
1971. On a quest for meaning.
(Billy Ray/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
“Why?” I asked, stunned.
“Because she would stop loving me.”
“That’s right,” added Elisabeth. “I wouldn’t respect him anymore if he let me come in the arms of another man.”
“That sounds more like hypocrisy than freedom to me,” I said.
“But freedom is not always a mathematical equation,” she answered in that way European intellectuals have, which always made me feel there was something I wasn’t getting. Now I hoped that during our trip I would find out how Elisabeth really felt about her late husband’s libertine ways, and I was prepared to be honest about my own experiences. She was the only person I felt I could discuss the subject with. In fact, I never did get clarity from Elisabeth on this subject, although I decided to broach it as we were driving through Yosemite National Park.
“Did you really not mind that Roger had other women?” I asked her. “Did you really enjoy bringing him other women?” Essentially she stuck to what she’d told me before, claiming that sexually and intellectually it pleased her to please him in that way: “I knew he loved me and I knew that these other women didn’t mean the same to him as I did.”
“I guess I wasn’t confident enough not to feel diminished by Vadim’s philanderings. I never dared to tell him I wanted him to be monogamous, because I was afraid of being thought bourgeois. I thought that maybe if I were a participant, it wouldn’t go on behind my back.”
“Did you enjoy being with women?” she asks.
“I don’t know. I thought I did at the time because I’m so good at becoming whatever my man wants me to be. I can convince myself of practically anything in the name of pleasing. But now that we’re not together anymore, I have been trying to probe what was really going on in my body. In some ways I think I did enjoy it. I liked having an up-close view of the varied ways women express passion. But to go through with it, I’d always have to drink enough to be in an altered state. I always felt scared and competitive—not the best frame of mind to be in when you’re having sex. And I always felt angry afterward, never at the women . . . at Vadim. I usually became chums with the women. It was the only way I could feel human under the circumstances, which made me feel used, not good enough, trampled over for his pleasure.
“What about you?” I asked Elisabeth. “Did you enjoy it?”
Elisabeth appeared to answer my question without really answering it. (At the end of that two-month trip, I still didn’t know where she stood on the subject of enjoyment.) I remember wishing I could be more . . . European, more opaque, like her. I suppose that’s why Vadim used to say I lacked mystery.
The fact that I participated in threesomes with Vadim was one symptom of my disembodiment, my loss of voice. It’s not as if he forced me to do it. Had I refused, he would have accepted that. I later discovered that his future wives didn’t do it. I have written about it because I know that it is not uncommon for girls to accept another woman into their beds to keep a man.
Back to the trip. I loved not having a set itinerary. We would stop whenever we chose and always shared the cheapest motels we could find ($8 a night on average for a shared room), since I had borrowed money from my business manager to pay for the trip. My inheritance was long gone thanks to Vadim’s gambling, and my film salary had been spent on the French farmhouse, which was now for sale.
No one recognized me. I didn’t look the way I was supposed to anymore. Three months earlier I still wore the ultrashort miniskirts, revealing blouses, and makeup that had been my costume during my years with Vadim—all designed to attract men’s attention. It hadn’t taken long for me to see that my appearance made it easier for people to objectify me and created a schism with other women. So I decided I wouldn’t dress for men anymore. I would dress so that women weren’t uncomfortable around me. My wardrobe was pared down to a few pairs of jeans, some drip-dry shirts, army boots, and a heavy
navy pea jacket. I had stopped wearing makeup. I was often surprised by the anger this elicited from people—men, mostly—who I think saw it as a betrayal. Soon articles about “just plain Jane” began appearing, with William Buckley writing, “She must never look into the mirror anymore.” That’s right—I’d looked into the mirror altogether too much during my life.
One day I called a friend in New York, who told me that five thousand women in the city were demonstrating for the legalization of abortion. I wrote in my journal,
Don’t understand the women’s liberation movement. There are more important things to have a movement for, it seems to me. To focus on women’s issues is diversionary when so much wrong is being done in the world. Each woman should take it upon herself to be liberated and show a man what that means.
Did I write that? Whew! I have included it here because I think it’s important to see how far a person can evolve. I’ve made it abundantly clear that I had not taken it upon myself to “be liberated” and show Vadim “what that meant.” I didn’t know yet that when part of the population is viewed as “less than”—culturally, economically, historically, politically, psychologically—it cannot be changed individual by individual. It takes the accumulated efforts of many, working in concert, for systemic change.
