My Life So Far (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  Jim and I talked by phone about the developing character of Kimberly. One day I announced to him that I wanted Kimberly to have flaming red hair. It was a way to tip my hat to a childhood heroine of mine, Brenda Starr, the gorgeous redheaded newspaper reporter in the comic strip of the same name. Jim had liked what I did with the Bree Daniel character in Klute when she was alone in her apartment and asked me how I thought Kimberly would be when she came home from work. Did she have a pet? How was her place decorated? I told him that she hadn’t even gotten around to unpacking from her move six months earlier from the San Francisco TV station to Los Angeles. Everything was still in boxes. In Klute I had decided Bree had a cat, and in one scene I licked the fork after I’d scraped some tuna fish into her bowl. Kimberly, I said, should have a giant turtle as a pet, something she’d had as a girl, and she talks to it every night when she carries it indoors with her to get it some lettuce (which Kimberly eats before handing it over to her turtle). In Bree’s apartment there was a signed photo of President Kennedy that seemed out of context and made audiences wonder about its significance to Bree. In the same way I wanted Kimberly to have a reproduction of the famous Andy Warhol silkscreen painting of Marilyn Monroe. Like a lot of women, I felt Kimberly would have a special thing for Marilyn because of the tensions she symbolized between humanity and ambition, strength and malleability. No small number of people over the years have asked me about both the turtle and that image of Marilyn. It doesn’t matter that they don’t know why Kimberly has these things; it gives her specificity and interest as a person. Jim and I loved throwing in these sorts of odd, conspiratorial tidbits. There was nothing but creative chemistry between us as we worked long-distance to create my role.

  The reason it was long-distance was that no sooner did I wrap Coming Home than I was off to Colorado to film Comes a Horseman, a story about a small Montana rancher just after World War II fighting to save her land from land barons and oil companies. James Caan was the co-star and Jason Robards played the land baron. But the big draws for me on this film were that Alan Pakula, who had directed me in Klute, was the director (with Gordon Willis once again the director of photography). It was also a great summer location where Tom, Troy, Vanessa, and I could be together; and I would be reunited with horses in a role that resembled a grown-up version of my childhood friend Sue Sally: a weathered, tough woman who ran her cattle ranch all by herself. It had been more than thirty years since I had been in a saddle, except for filming Cat Ballou in 1964, the only other western I’d ever done and it was of an entirely different nature.

  Frankly, I was unsure whether I could really play the part of this crusty woman, but Alan again gave me the courage to try. I knew that to do it properly I would have to become like the wranglers who rustle cattle and work the horses on western films. It wasn’t the riding that would be the challenge; like sex and bicycles, that comes right back. But I needed to learn to throw a lasso, rope a calf, round up cattle, and brand and castrate male calves. Not that I had to do all of that in the film, but I needed the wranglers to know that, like my character Ella, I could do it all if asked, that I wasn’t a city slicker. The wranglers’ belief in me would give me belief in myself—as Ella.

  I was working steadily, without a break, and my career was going full speed. I think about this when I hear admonitions from the powers that be warning outspoken actors to remember “what happened to Jane Fonda back in the seventies.” This has me scratching my head: And that would be? The suggestion is that because of my actions against the war my career had been destroyed and that this will happen to them if they don’t get with the program. But the truth is that my career, far from being destroyed after the war, flourished with a vigor it had not previously enjoyed.

  It was during this period that Tom and I did one of the best things we did together: We bought two hundred acres north of Santa Barbara (two hours from our home) and created a performing arts summer camp for kids called Laurel Springs. Though I didn’t recognize it at the time, what I learned at Laurel Springs laid the foundation for my third-act activism.

  I learned to rope for my role in Comes a Horseman—here with James Caan.

  (© Steve Schapiro)

  At Laurel Springs Ranch with Tom, Troy, and our German shepard, Geronimo.

  (© Steve Schapiro)

  The first group of campers at Laurel Springs. Vanessa is in the second row, directly behind the boy holding the camp sign, staring straight into the camera. Troy is way down in the front on the right. Tom is in the hat, back row, right.

  Vanessa, age eleven.

  We wanted it to be a place where our friends could send their children—but we had an unusually diverse group of friends, ranging from people in the United Farm Workers union to city council and school board members to former Black Panthers to directors of community-based organizations to movie stars and heads of major studios. These were the varied backgrounds of the children who came to camp, and this diversity was what made it a unique and transformative summer experience that ran for fourteen years, from 1977 until 1991. Girls who had always had maids making their beds shared a cabin with girls who had never had a room of their own. Macho Latino gang member wannabes shared a bunkroom with a pale blond boy who suffered from muscular dystrophy and had to be carried everywhere. His courage in the face of his disability helped the other boys redefine the meaning of being a “real man.”

  I learned that even in a short period of time, a camp experience can transform a bully into a brother, a shy girl into someone unafraid to express herself, an urban kid who had been afraid of long grass into a real outdoorsman. I was surprised to see how exposure to nature could be terrifying for an urban youngster who had never seen a night sky filled with stars or felt mud oozing between his toes. Camp gave kids an opportunity to try on new identities. At home and in school, children often get tagged as being the “troublemaker,” the “fast girl,” the “macho boy,” the “nerd.” Camp allowed them to become a tabula rasa, a clean slate, where they could start over and discover other parts of themselves. It always surprised me when parents would tell me, as they dropped off their children for the new camp season, how the effects of last year’s two weeks had remained with their child all year long. As Michael Carrera of the Children’s Aid Society has written, “Young people may forget what you say or what you do, but they will never forget how you made them feel.”

  This is the age when youngsters are going through intense changes and too often have no one to go to for help in working through the complicated maze of adolescence. The counselors at Laurel Springs heard a lot of “I have these feelings when I’m around her, like in my body, something happens. What is that?” This gave the counselors the opportunity to explain puberty, what menstruation signifies, or how the boy’s body was changing and new feelings were coming up; that this was totally normal and beautiful; but that having the feelings doesn’t mean he or she has to act on them. (The kinds of things my parents never discussed with me, nor I with my children—to my deep regret.) Campers came to our counselors to talk about their parents’ addictions, about divorce, about death. I learned how important it is for children who’ve lacked physical affection to be held, to feel a warm, loving human touch without sexual overtones. Girls who have never had the loving arms of a father in which to safely rehearse tenderness will tend to go straight to sexuality in an attempt to get the craved contact. I learned how transformative it is for children to set goals and achieve them, be witnessed and acknowledged for it. I learned the extent to which deprivation can exist among children of the rich and the emotional richness that can exist among the very poor. I learned the importance of exposing children who have everything to children who have very little, and vice versa. I learned, to my amazement, that approximately one-fourth of the girls at camp had been sexually abused.

  Vanessa went to camp from age eight until fourteen and feels it was an important influence. She liked being physically challenged (with the older campers she climbed Mount Whitney
) and spending time in the wilderness.

  Troy says, “Camp was sort of my great social learning experience. I came to know children of farmworkers, children from all walks of life, through emotional, caring relationships. Regardless of what material possessions you had in the ‘real’ world, at camp people interacted with each other based on your character, not your possessions.”

  Troy grew up with the camp, starting out as its mascot when he was too young to attend officially and becoming an assistant counselor by the end. I watched him come into his own over the summers, developing crushes, learning the pleasures of slow dancing. One day when he was about fifteen, I came face-to-face with the realization that he possessed an unusual acting ability. I was watching him rehearse a play in which he played a gay tango dancer. His choices were so brave and free, so much more comedic and physical than mine (or his grandfather’s, for that matter) had ever been. Right then and there I decided to do the opposite of what my father had done with my brother and me. I went up to Troy after the rehearsal and said, “Son, you have real talent. If you decide one day that this is a profession you want to go into, I will totally support you in that decision.” Some years later, that is exactly what happened.

  There was a beautiful eleven-year-old black girl from Oakland named Lulu. Everyone loved her. She had a laugh like a cascade of wind chimes. Her parents had been members of the Black Panther party, and her uncle worked with Tom. Lulu came for two years running, and then for several years we saw no more of her. When she returned at age fourteen, she had changed. She slept all day, couldn’t tolerate being in a crowd, rarely spoke, and had terrible nightmares every night. At the end of the camp session, she confided to a counselor that she had been brutally molested by a man over a prolonged period of time. She had told no one because the man threatened to kill her and her family if she did.

  Lulu was suffering from severe posttraumatic stress disorder, sleeping most of the time (as PTSD sufferers are prone to do), and getting D’s and F’s in school despite her innate intelligence. She had come back to camp because she needed to tell someone. I made a deal with her that if she brought her grades up to B’s by the end of the school year, I would get her into a school in Santa Monica and she could stay with us.

  Lulu was fourteen when she came into our home and had been with us for about a month when one morning she came up to me as I was washing breakfast dishes and said, “I need to say something, but I’m a little ashamed.”

  “It’s okay, Lulu, go ahead.”

  “I never knew till being here that all mothers don’t beat their children.”

  I realized that simply allowing this young woman to be in a home where children disagreed with their parents and weren’t beaten for it, where people sat at the table and talked together, was opening up a new world to her. Frankly I often wonder which of us has learned more from the other, Lulu or me.

  I asked her once why the camp was an important experience for her. She hesitated for a moment before answering. “It’s the first time I’ve been with people who think about the future.”

  That stopped me short, and coming to terms with what it implied has framed the way I see my work today with children and families in Georgia. There’s a saying: “The rich plan for generations; the poor plan for Saturday nights.” Middle-class folks take for granted that we have a future that requires planning for. To never think about the future means you live without hope.

  One day while we were driving back from Laurel Springs, Lulu announced to me that she wanted to have a child.

  “Why?” I asked, taken aback.

  “I want something that belongs to me,” she answered simply and honestly.

  “Get a dog!” was my reply. Then I went on to talk with her about what would happen to her life if she had a child to care for before she was an adult woman. Having a child has few consequences if you don’t see a future for yourself. When I once heard Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, say, “Hope is the best contraception,” I knew because of Lulu how true these words were in relation not just to early pregnancy, but to drugs, violence, and a host of other behaviors that are indicators of hopelessness.

  Lulu did not have a child. She went on to graduate from college, got herself into graduate school in public health at Boston University (with no help from me), and has developed into a remarkable success story. Filled with intellectual curiosity and commitment to justice, she remains a member of my family. Early in her life Lulu had received just enough love from her mother to instill resilience in her, which is what enabled her to survive—spirit intact—later difficulties, of which her sexual molestation was but one example. Lulu also attributes her resilience to the Black Panther party in Oakland.

  Lulu, age thirteen.

  Troy, age six.

  Singing hymns with Tom and Mignon McCarthy at our annual Easter bash at the ranch. I was always the Easter bunny. I miss that.

  “I grew up with the Panther programs—their hot breakfasts and the things they did for kids. They were like my family.”

  Sometimes I feel as though I have a magnet on my skin and when I walk through the world the relevant input I need for my journey jumps out from the hurly-burly and sticks to me. That’s the way it was at Laurel Springs. I needed the lessons the camp taught over those fourteen years.

  My children had their own learning experiences. Both Vanessa and Troy grew up feeling different from others their age. Vanessa lived in two countries, spoke two languages, experienced two styles of parenting. “I liked having two lives—being different,” she says. “I still do.”

  Troy’s sense of difference didn’t start until he entered a public junior high school and students would ask him why he wasn’t driven to school in a limousine since his mother was a movie star. “This made me uncomfortable because it made me feel I was being looked at as a material object. I had never before had any awareness of material things or of the paradoxes of my life—living simply the way we did, yet you being famous. I began to feel like a misfit. But the best thing about being a misfit is that it attracts you to other misfits. And they’re usually the most interesting people.”

  One area in which Troy realized there were differences with his friends had to do with the nature of his extended family. “Whereas my friends had aunts, older sisters, grandmothers, to assist in raising them,” he told me recently, “I had au pairs, nannies, political organizers, and your assistants. You were my ‘core mother,’ and then you had tentacles. Dad would be one. Laurel Springs was another.”

  For Vanessa and Troy, camp provided a safe setting for many firsts: first kiss, slow dancing, wilderness. For Lulu, it provided a future.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE WORKOUT

  There are no gains without pains.

  —BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

  Great ideas originate in the muscles.

  —THOMAS EDISON

  IT WAS EXPENSIVE running a statewide nonprofit organization like CED in a state as big and diverse as California, and the weakness in the economy was making it increasingly difficult to raise the necessary funds. I was making one or more movies a year by now—Julia, Coming Home, Fun with Dick and Jane, The China Syndrome, Comes a Horseman, California Suite—most quite successful, and every premiere would be a benefit for CED. Still, we worried about being able to sustain the work.

  Then I read an article about Lyndon LaRouche, founder of the National Caucus of Labor Committees. (You may remember back in the late seventies seeing people standing in major airports with signs saying things like “Jane Fonda Leaks More Than Nuclear Power Plants” or “Feed Fonda to the Whales.” Those people had ties to LaRouche, as did some of the goons who went into bars to beat with chains people they suspected of being gay.) This article said that LaRouche’s organization was financed, at least in part, by his computer business. That set Tom and me thinking: Why not start a business that would fund CED? For a while we considered going into the restaurant business, and we actually spent a
month or so driving around looking for one to buy, asking people what went into running a successful restaurant. We also toyed with the idea of an auto repair shop where people wouldn’t be ripped off.

  One day John Maher, charismatic co-founder of Delancey Street, an entrepreneurial halfway house for addicts, said to me, “Never go into a business you don’t understand.” That was about the best business advice I have ever received, but it not only ruled out the restaurant and car repair ideas, it seemed to narrow our options to zero. What did I know about any business?

  As it turned out, plenty. I just had to see what was staring me in the face.