My Life So Far (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  We developed The Dollmaker for television, and I was fascinated by the differences between film and television. For one thing television is a writer’s medium, whereas film is a director’s medium. With film you sit in a darkened theater with nothing else going on, looking up at the huge screen, moved as much by evocative images and camera angles as by the words. Often in films the essence of the story is conveyed visually. Television, on the other hand, is a cozy medium. You’re at home in your living room or in bed, looking at a little box, far less aware of the visual impact than you are the dialogue. This is why, often in television, the writers are also the producers—and have more power than they do in movies. And since with television you don’t have to wait for just the right cloud formation or the perfect lighting effect to fill a huge screen, a TV movie can be shot in a matter of weeks, whereas a feature film usually takes three months. This came as a shock to me when we began shooting The Dollmaker. Scenes I had imagined and labored over for years—like the opening, where Gertie, riding a mule and carrying her ill infant son, stops a car and performs a tracheotomy on him in the glare of the car’s headlights on the side of the road—would take a week to complete in a film. We shot it in a day!

  The star-studded Clean Water Caravan in support of Proposition 65, with Dweezil Zappa, Linda Gray, Bobby Walden, Victoria Principal, Ed Begley, Jr., Joanna Kerns, Patricia Duff, LeVar Burton, Charlie Haid, Tyne Daly, Georg Stanford Brown, Troy, Moon Zappa, Bonnie Bedelia, Shari Belafonte, Linda Evans, Daphne Zuniga, among others.

  (© 1986 Michael Jacobs/MJP)

  As Gertie Nevels in The Dollmaker.

  (© Steve Schapiro)

  This didn’t keep The Dollmaker from being one of the most joyous acting experiences of my career. Our director—the nurturing, supportive, sensitive Dan Petrie—hovered like an angel over it all.

  Petrie once told a film class of his that after my last shot he turned to me and said, “Well, Miss Fonda, it’s a wrap,” and I broke down and sobbed for a long time while he held me.

  “I tried to analyze later why those tears,” Dan told the class. “Why racking sobs? It was because of the death of the character, of somebody that she had invested so much time in and lavished so much love on.” Yes, I had tapped into the Gertie part of me and it was hard to let go. I loved her so.

  I think most of us have many personas inside us at the outset, but over time we lean to the one that is dominant and the others atrophy for lack of use. The difference with actors is that we are paid to become all the people inside us and to bring into us all the people we may have met along the way. Thus we remain instinctively aware of, unsettled by, curious about, empathetic toward, and eager to display all those potential beings we carry. Of all these, the empathy part is the most important and is, I believe, why actors—the good ones—tend to be open, progressive creatures: We are asked to get inside the skin of “other,” to feel with “other,” to understand “other.” Being able to see from this “other” point of view gives actors compassion. Is that why artists have little tolerance for dictators, even those disguised as patriots? Because dictators abhor the variables in human nature, the very things artists cherish.

  The Dollmaker aired on ABC on Mother’s Day 1984, and I learned something else about television that day: I knew exactly what time my film would show, and as the time approached I found myself wanting to go up to everyone I saw on the street and say, “What are you doing? You should be going home to watch this movie.” Lots of people did see it, and for many it is their favorite of my films. I won an Emmy for it.

  By the mid-eighties Tom was in the state legislature and I was in emotional limbo, plowing through life by sheer force of will (of which I have an abundance), but willpower can be anathema to creativity. Creativity requires a looseness, a letting go, an openness that allows the psyche to plumb the moist depths where the stuff of dreams and myths percolate. On the other hand, the I-will-get- that-done- I-will-remain- married-I-will-be- perfect-I- will-not-express- my-needs mode of living means existing in a contracted body with shallow breath and nothing to nourish the spirit—“No wild and unheard-of melodies / No tunes that rise from the blood / no blood calling from the deep places,” as poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it.

  Without “blood calling from the deep places,” my work that followed The Dollmaker—Agnes of God, The Morning After, Old Gringo, and finally Stanley and Iris—became harder and harder, although there were moments in all of them that I cherish.

  I just didn’t want to be doing it anymore. It was too agonizing. I was experiencing creative disintegration, and I didn’t understand that my inability to be honest about the disintegration of my long marriage, the shutting down of my body, and my feeling totally responsible for it all was slowly draining me of life. I remember sitting in my hotel room in Toronto, where I was making Stanley and Iris, and thinking, What will I do with my life? What is there for me? I saw only a joyless road ahead, and I couldn’t admit that it was because there was no future in the marriage. It was inconceivable to me that my couplehood with Tom wasn’t going to be forever. Leaving would be a sign of defeat, and defeat was not an option. Besides, without Tom what would I be?

  Jimmy Smits, Gregory Peck, and me in Old Gringo.

  (Mary Ellen Mark)

  With director Sidney Lumet on the set of The Morning After.

  With Robert De Niro in Stanley and Iris.

  (© Steve Schapiro)

  He asked, “Do you love me?” and when I answered, “Yes,” he asked me to write him a letter telling why. Once I’d finished the part about his being a wonderful father, I got stuck. Why couldn’t I think of reasons for loving him? Why did my hand want to write only the anger?

  My wonderful, loyal, always intelligent body kept desperately sending me signals by repeatedly attracting mishaps the way abandoned bodies do: Pay attention to me, listen to me. This hadn’t happened to me since my injury-prone days in Greenwich when my mother and father’s marriage was delaminating. When I ignored my body’s signals I was paid back in broken bones: fingers, ribs, feet. On his desk Tom kept a photo of me that he’d taken when I broke my collarbone. When I broke my nose in a biking spill during the filming of Stanley and Iris he wanted a photo of that as well. Maybe he liked me better broken.

  I was broken—sexless and fallow. I think it is when people have lost touch with their spirit, their life force, that they become most vulnerable to consumer culture and the toxic drive for perfection. Instead of dealing with my crisis in a real way, I got breast implants. I am ashamed of this, but I understand why I did it at the time. I somehow believed that if I looked more womanly, I would become more womanly. So much of my life had become a façade; what did it matter if I added my body to the list of falsehoods?

  It was for me that I did it. In fairness, Tom was adamantly opposed. Here was the woman who had once impressed him by crying in empathy for the Vietnamese women who had mutilated their bodies to conform to a Playboy image of femininity and now she was doing the same thing to herself. I knew when I did it that I was betraying myself, but my self had shrunk to the size of a thimble.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE GIFT OF PAIN

  No phoenix can arise from no ashes.

  —MARION WOODMAN,

  Leaving My Father’s House

  ON THE NIGHT I turned fifty-one Tom announced to me that he was in love with another woman.

  The bottom dropped out of life with a devastation so abrupt and severe that my very existence appeared as a foreign landscape. I felt as though I had just learned I was adopted. Oddly enough I hadn’t seen it coming.

  It happened during Christmas 1988. We were all in Aspen, Colorado: Troy, Vanessa, Lulu, Nathalie, Tom, and me, sharing a small rented condo. I didn’t want to spoil everyone’s vacation, so I said nothing—stiff upper lip and all that. So as not to let on there was trouble, I’d wait till everyone had gone to bed and then I’d lie on the living room couch alternately sobbing and reading a novel by Amos Oz.


  Never in my life could I have imagined surviving such emotional pain or known that it would assume an actual physical presence. I felt blood oozing through the pores of my skin; the pain of a dagger being turned in my heart that now weighed a hundred pounds—allowing me for the first time to understand the meaning of “heavy heart.” I was unable to speak above a whisper for almost a month, or to move swiftly or to swallow food. My throat closed in on itself. Back in Los Angeles, my friend Paula offered me a massage but I fled from the table, unable to stand being touched, unworthy of pleasure. I had been nothing’d.

  Given what I have written about the deterioration of our marriage and our lack of communication, you may be wondering why Tom’s blurted admission affected me so deeply. It opened some old, primal rupture, exposing me to an onslaught of pain and grief that went way beyond the end of a troubled marriage.

  I don’t think Tom expected it to be the end. I think he believed, as did others, that I had known all along of his infidelities and didn’t really mind. Maybe some part of me did know. Maybe that’s why anger would well up when we made love.

  I felt overwhelming shame. I didn’t tell anyone for several weeks, not even Paula. When I finally did tell her, she took me in. For more than a week I lived with her and her husband, Mark Rosenberg, in their house on Wadsworth Avenue, right down from where Tom and I had spent over ten years. I didn’t have the strength to ask Tom to move out.

  When I finally did decide to call it quits months later, I went back to my house, gathered all of Tom’s belongings into large plastic bags, and threw them out the window into the garden. That helped . . . a little.

  But not much. This was so new for me. I had always been the strong one, the Lone Ranger, never blindsided by a pain so profound that my customary arsenal of self-protection was rendered inoperable. The terrain was so unfamiliar that I was unhinged from all my moorings. I would set out for the market and have to pull off the road because my body would be so racked with sobs that I couldn’t drive. I would step outside and wonder why the sun was shining, astonished by this undeniable proof of nature’s indifference. The robin’s-egg-blue sky, unchanged from yesterday, gave an acute sense of permanence to the idea of going forward alone. Death loomed so vividly that I remember insisting it be stipulated in my divorce settlement that Tom not be allowed to speak at my funeral. (I was convinced that he would opportunistically try to do so and couldn’t imagine that we would ever again be close enough friends to justify it.)

  It wasn’t him I missed as much as an amorphous us, the “usness” that celebrated every Easter at the ranch with two hundred of our friends, me dressed up as the Easter bunny, the egg hunts, hay rides, hymn singing, and square dancing; the “usness” that went to Dodgers games with Troy and his buddies from Little League; the “usness” that had, I felt, helped end the war. Usness was gone. And I was fifty-one years old.

  Later I realized that both Troy and Vanessa had known the marriage was troubled; but if Tom and I were unable to talk to each other about what was happening, we certainly weren’t able to talk to the children, and they didn’t feel able to initiate the discussion. Vanessa would try to open a dialogue through her anger, but when she did I would shut down. Troy was fifteen and Vanessa twenty when we told them we were separating.

  Vanessa was in Africa, working together with Nathalie on a television movie that Vadim was directing. She was acting as language coach, still photographer, and assistant director. I wasn’t sure what to do. I was unaccustomed to reaching out and asking for help. I didn’t want to burden her or disrupt her work, and I also felt so ashamed. Here I’d gone and failed again. But as soon as I told Paula what had happened, she said, “You have to call Vanessa right away. She absolutely needs to know.” Her saying this allowed me to acknowledge how desperately I needed Vanessa with me. Within days she was home, and this meant more to me than she will ever know.

  Vanessa had never particularly liked Tom—or rather she didn’t like what she saw me becoming with Tom: giving up myself to suit him (they have subsequently become good friends). Confronted with my sadness, however, I remember her saying (mostly to herself), “Be careful what you wish for.” It was her way of expressing both her own long held hopes that I would leave him and her empathy for me.

  She also said, “Maybe now you can spend more time with your women friends who Tom chased away.”

  “He did?” I asked, wanting now to know truths that I’d not been able to receive before.

  “Mom,” Vanessa said, rolling her eyes heavenward in disdain at my inability to see what everyone knew. “Lois, Julie, Paula—why do you think they haven’t come around much? Tom doesn’t like them and they know it. He was always putting you down, too, but you didn’t know it.”

  Tom moved to Santa Monica into a rented apartment with a room for Troy, and that’s where Troy mostly stayed. This struck terror in my heart: Was he choosing Tom over me? Was I going to lose my son? But today he explains his decision: “I could see that Dad needed me more than you did. He was in bad shape.” He was right.

  I remember asking a friend what I should say to Troy about the breakup and being told, “Say what you feel.”

  Say what I feel! If nothing else, I knew I couldn’t do that. Think of every angry, damning, never-to-be-forgotten word you could call somebody you wanted to murder, and that will give you some idea of what I felt. I couldn’t foist that onto my son. A small voice inside was telling me that when the roller-coaster ride was over, my anger would subside and I’d see it was for the best and be grateful that Tom had been the catalyst to end it (which is what happened, but it took two years). I spent a lot of time thinking how awful it is for children to become the battleground between warring ex-spouses and how much self-control and maturity it takes to keep a lid on things. Yet I didn’t want to do what my parents had done and what I’d done with Nathalie when I left her father—not show emotion, not encourage a discussion of what was happening that would create a space for them to express their feelings. The trick was to try to do it without anger. Sadness, yes, but not anger.

  So I allowed Troy and Vanessa to see me cry, but at the same time I made sure to let them know that a split was a two-way street and that I was partly to blame, which I knew to be true. I talked to them about the primary lesson I was learning from it all: the need to communicate, to recognize feelings, and to express them. Tom and I really didn’t let each other know what we were feeling. Maybe he didn’t try hard enough, or maybe I didn’t try hard enough or didn’t want to hear, or maybe the marriage was meant to be resonant only for a certain period of time (it was—for seven years) and unintentionally we were both looking for ways out.

  The comedy The Seven Year Itch was onto something, and it’s about much more than sex. According to science, all our cells change every seven years. The Bible is also full of significant sevens (“On the seventh day . . .”). And it seems that people go through major psychic transitions every seven or so years and therein lies the rub: What if a couple’s transitions don’t mesh? That’s when choices have to be made: We can part, we can remain together on different wavelengths and do our best, or we can try to understand each other’s transitions and work to make them compatible. Tom’s and my wavelengths had grown too distant. After sixteen years, not knowing how to make our differences compatible, we parted.

  My friends told me to stay busy. I knew that was wrong for me. Busy was what I’d been—busy and inside my own head. Now for the first time I was in a situation where who I was and how I was used to functioning were no longer valid. Therefore I had to allow everything to reorganize, not on a cognitive level (since I was, quite literally, out of my mind) but somatically, on a cellular level. For this to happen, I knew unconsciously that I needed to be very still and allow myself to witness what was happening and feel it.

  I surrounded myself with loving women friends and classical music. My home became a haven. I knew that I needed all the endorphins my body could muster, so I forced myself to keep working
out and took marathon bike rides and hikes with women friends.

  Through the pain I could tell that something new was happening to me. Trauma was creating an opening in my psyche. I needed to pay attention, to be ready to step through and descend into it, whatever it was. It felt archetypal. Something in me was being slain in the fires of pain so that some new thing could be born. I knew it and went with it, and in the alchemy of my pain, like flowers whose seeds open only in the presence of fire, tendrils of something new began to sprout. Pain for me was a Trojan horse, penetrating the protective walls I’d erected around my heart, bearing within it hints of a future I might never have awakened to had I tried to numb myself with busyness.

  One day I heard myself say out loud, “If God wanted me to suffer like this, there must be a reason.” God? I looked around. Did I just say God? Never had such a thought come into my head. I’m an atheist, right? But the moment I said it, the texture of my pain changed ever so slightly. It became easier to be patient, giving myself over to . . . what? I didn’t know, but I was so weakened that it was easy to let myself go limp and just be.