My Life So Far (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  Ted’s adoration for me made me feel good about myself. Good about myself. I have to stay with that one for a moment. He told me, so generously and frequently, that he loved me, that he thought I was smart and beautiful, the love of his life, that it began to chip away at my low self-esteem: Ted Turner thinks I’m great and smart and beautiful, and he’s no dummy. What’s touching is that while I was feeling this, Ted was feeling: Wow, if Jane Fonda loves me, I can’t be all bad. Much as some people might find it hard to believe, we were two people with fragile egos who could make each other feel stronger.

  Yet for more than a year there were times when I would feel myself falling into a dark hole. I was learning to listen to my body more, to pay attention to my feelings, and something just didn’t feel right. I was certain that he loved me, but then he would say or do something that made me feel his antennae were still up, that my position in his life was permanent, perhaps, but not solo.

  We talked about it a lot. He would say, “We’re looking at the same canvas and you are seeing one thing and I am seeing another,” and he would assure me that my paranoia was unfounded. He began to tell me that the problem was that I was scared of intimacy. True. Why else had I twice before chosen men who were not capable of intimacy? I was, I would remind myself, the daughter of my parents: They were two people who lacked emotional attunement.

  Perhaps you think that by intimacy I mean sex, so allow me to clarify. Sex can be intimate but isn’t necessarily so; sometimes it’s just the pleasurable stimulation of genitalia. By intimacy I mean an attunement between two people who, despite each other’s evident flaws, open their hearts fully to each other. This openness makes them vulnerable, so trust is key. So is self-love: It’s impossible to be truly intimate with someone if you don’t like yourself.

  On at least four occasions I told Ted that I didn’t feel he was really there for me and that I would have to leave. Each time, he would become so palpably miserable that it would convince me to stay. “Jane,” he said to me one night, “I need to know I can depend on you. You can’t keep threatening to leave me, or this won’t work.”

  And suddenly . . . whack! The thought slams into me how easily I could blow it because of fears about things that might only be my imaginings. Why am I not allowing myself to be happy? It’s so much easier to hold on to those old ghosts, the hurts and grievances, to knead and nurse them. It’s comforting because they are what’s familiar, not these new feelings of happiness. Mustn’t trust them . . . they’re too fickle.

  But, Jane old girl, this isn’t some rehearsal where you’ll get notes afterward and a chance to do it better. No, this is but a few years away from the beginning of the last act of your life. Every day counts; every chance to make peace with the old ghosts must be seized. They’re not your friends—they’re your jail keepers who have outlived their usefulness. They won’t keep you warm on a cold night in Montana. Humor and love and the understanding of your new partner will keep them at bay. He’ll do that for you and you’ll do that for him.

  One day Ted asked me, “What do you want out of this relationship?” I liked the question and knew that I needed to take my time and really think before I answered. Ted is a negotiator, and whatever my answer was, I would be held to it as to a contract.

  “Give me twenty-four hours to think about it,” I said.

  And then I pondered: What do I want? Trust. Happiness. Love. To be seen, countenanced. I had begun to notice how when those things are not present, when I feel scared or am doing something I don’t want to be doing, my breathing gets shallow and my muscles tense and I don’t feel good.

  “What I want out of this relationship,” I told him the next evening, “is to feel good.”

  “Great! Me too. I want to feel good. Oh boy, party time.”

  “No, Ted,” I interrupted, laughing at his take, which I should have expected. “I don’t mean feeling good that way. I mean feeling good the way people do when they feel safe: seen, heard, fully loved.”

  “Oh yeah . . . okay. That’s fine. I get it. Me too.”

  Only then, a good year into the relationship, did I tell him that I needed him to be monogamous. He agreed.

  For all intents and purposes, I had decided to stop acting and producing by the time I met Ted, but once I committed to the relationship, it became a done deal. Ted made that abundantly clear. I was convinced that my career (and the long absences from home that it required) had been a big problem in my marriage to Tom, and I wasn’t going to let that happen again; but the feelings that this new reality brought up in me were tough to handle. I had worked from the time I was twenty-two. It was in many ways who I was, though I never quite realized this until I decided to stop working. It wasn’t about money. I had enough money to pay my own bills, buy my own clothes, and support my children, all of which I continued to do while I was with Ted. Financial independence was of fundamental importance to me. This fact, I believe, was what created a semblance of a balance of power between us. The anxiety that arose with my retirement was more about giving up what had been my personal, creative outlet and about being subsumed into Ted’s orbit.

  While Vanessa, never one to steer away from confrontation, expressed outright anger about my subsumation, Troy simply said one morning while he was visiting Ted and me, “I don’t want a mom who doesn’t work,” which, I think, translated into his not wanting me to be merely “wife of.” Both of them sensed that some part of me wouldn’t be able to flourish. Lulu took to Ted immediately. He was the father figure she’d never had. Nathalie seemed to sense that Ted made me happier than she’d ever seen me, and that was enough for her. But I don’t want to minimize the impact that my decision to take up a full-time relationship with Ted had on Vanessa and Troy. They saw me leave behind their home base, as well as my identity as an actress, producer, businesswoman, and political activist, to enter the constantly moving, glitzy life of the corporate media world and on the arm of a former Goldwater Republican. But it wasn’t as though they were waiting for me to come home. Troy would soon head to the University of Colorado in Boulder; Vanessa was in her last year at Brown University and had taken a year off to help build a village school in Nicaragua and work with her father in Zaire. Nathalie had a flourishing career as an assistant film director; Lulu was a graduate student at Boston University.

  Once again I seemed to have become someone new because of a man. But beneath the surface I felt a continuity in core values. With Ted I felt I could achieve the true, deep soul connection that had eluded me. Ted was not intimidated by me. I loved him. I loved his smell, his skin, his playfulness, his worldview, his transparency—and I knew that I was finally ready to do the needed work on myself to overcome my fear of intimacy. I wanted this to work and I was prepared to put some parts of myself (moviemaking, mostly) to bed, believing that other parts (my heart) would be waking up. Ultimately I was right, though it didn’t end up the way I thought it would.

  My fear of intimacy had yet to be conquered, so I wasn’t able to see that Ted himself wasn’t capable of really showing up in a relationship. I didn’t even notice his absence until I began to heal myself. Still, I did heal, and I learned so much from Ted on so many levels that I don’t regret throwing myself wholeheartedly into trying to make it succeed. Even so, there were days when I was overcome with the feeling that I was making a big mistake and could lose my children and my life.

  Nonetheless, I sold my home in Santa Monica as well as Laurel Springs Ranch, packed my belongings, moved all my furniture into Ted’s various houses, and migrated south.

  I’d never been in the South long enough to get to know it, and immediately I was struck by people’s friendliness. Never in all my travels had I been in a place where people came up and said, “Welcome, we’re so glad you’re here.” I knew, of course, about the political conservatism. And some of Ted’s acquaintances were less than happy about my appearance on the scene. Ted would say, “Jane was right about Vietnam. I was wrong.” He was ready to stand beside me.r />
  The South took some adjusting to. It forced me to slow down, shift gears, and pay close attention. There were so many otherances: the yes-ma’am-no-sir culture, for instance.

  My women friends in the West had been feminists; their relationships with their partners were democratic—shared child care, housekeeping, and cooking, working outside the home, holding independent political opinions. Therefore I was surprised at what I first perceived as subservience, a high importance placed on tradition and propriety among many southern white women. (I found this not true of most of the black women I met, perhaps because, from childhood, many black women have been taught that they have to take care of themselves.) As I got to know them, however, southern white women turned out to have plenty of starch in their spines, much more than had been apparent at first blush, and I have, over time, given much thought to why there is that misleading first impression.

  The South was an agrarian culture for much longer than the industrialized North: Families lived on farms, some on plantations; it was a culture of property, including humans as property. The institution of slavery condoned one race-based group of humans serving as commodities to enhance the social and economic power of the other. This made the gender-based subservience within the patriarchal family seem more normal and acceptable. Add to this the fact of living in isolated rural communities, where it was difficult for women to know there was any other way and no place to go to if they were cast out because of their uppity behavior. Church life was the South’s central social outlet, and there, too, hierarchy and conformity rule. Seeing it from this historical perspective made it easier for me to embrace my less uppity southern women friends.

  One more obvious difference: church. In California, the only people I knew who regularly went to religious services were my Jewish friends. Now, suddenly, I was getting to know—and like—smart, progressive, funny, not-uptight practicing Christians. Some were not famous; some were—President Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, Ambassador Andy Young, and others with whom my relationship with Ted brought me in regular contact.

  I was still experiencing a feeling of being “led”—watched over—but I viewed it as a secular phenomenon, and the deep faith of my new friends was a source of fascination to me. Could it be, I wondered, that what is leading them is what is leading me? Whenever I was with my Christian friends, I would always ask them questions about their faith.

  Not since my early years in Greenwich, Connecticut, had racial issues been so much in evidence as when I moved south, though I don’t know to this day whether there actually is more racism in the South. It may just be more hidden elsewhere. Early on, Lulu (who is dark-skinned) made me aware of differences in how racism in the South has been internalized by African-Americans. Asked how she felt about living in Atlanta (where she moved a few years after I did), she said, “I have felt more discriminated against by blacks, especially light-skinned blacks, down here than I ever did by whites in the North.”

  An important part of the new world that I stepped into were Ted’s five children: Jennie, the youngest, was a student at Georgia State; Beauregard (Beau), the youngest of the three boys, was in his second year at the Citadel in South Carolina; Rhett, the first child from Ted’s second marriage, to Janie Smith, was a cameraman with CNN in Tokyo; Teddy, the eldest son from Ted’s first marriage, to Judy Nye, was working with a country music cable network; and Laura, the firstborn, ran her own clothing store in Atlanta’s fashionable Buckhead district and had just started dating a man with the wonderfully southern name Rutherford—Rutherford Seydel II—whom she would soon marry. I’m glad that I came into Ted’s life in time to see two of the children graduate, all of them marry, have babies, and grow into adulthood.

  Side by side with President Jimmy Carter at a Habitat for Humanity blitz in Americus, Georgia.

  (Julie Lopez/Habitat for Humanity International)

  Janice Crystal took this picture of Ted and me at the Flying D while she and Billy were visiting.

  (Billy and Janice Crystal)

  Like their father, they are survivors of complicated childhoods, and I grew to admire and love each of them for how they have coped and matured.

  Because of the important role Susan had played in my adolescence, I knew how to be a stepmother, and saw right away that one important thing I could do was help bring Ted closer with the children. The five of them love and admire their father and embrace his values.

  Ted embraces differences; he believes in putting his arms around everyone, including people with whom he doesn’t agree. He would say to me, “You catch more bees with honey than with vinegar.” I watched him practice what he preached and saw people change as a result. I changed as a result. I have met and become friends with conservative Republicans and Christians I would never otherwise have taken the time to get to know; I would thus have missed seeing the common humanity beneath the surface differences.

  I’m someone who loves learning new things and facing challenges, and there were plenty of those in the new life I’d chosen. Besides Ted’s humor, sex appeal, and intelligence, he was offering me Paradise. Most of our time together, especially in the beginning, was spent on his various properties, riding, fishing, hiking, and exploring. Back then the properties numbered five, not counting Atlanta, and just as you start a jigsaw puzzle with the corners and edges, his “starter properties” ranged from his coastal island off South Carolina to Big Sur on the other edge, with Montana at the top. By our third year together, he had begun filling in the middle—two more in Montana, three in the Sand Hills of Nebraska, two in South Dakota, and three in New Mexico, one of which includes an entire mountain range, the Fra Cristobal just to the east of Elephant Butte Reservoir. Vermejo Park Ranch, on the northern border of New Mexico near Raton and overlapping into Colorado, comprises almost 600,000 acres—the largest privately owned, contiguous piece of property in the United States, nearly as large as Rhode Island (it starts in the Rockies and ends in the Great Plains). Besides these, Ted has two spectacular properties in Patagonia and one in Tierra del Fuego, for a total of something in the neighborhood of 1.7 million acres.

  Left to right: Lois Bonfiglio (my producing partner after Bruce), Paula Weinstein, me, and Becky Fonda—visiting me on the Bar None Ranch.

  Troy and Lulu bass fishing at Avalon Plantation.

  Once he got started with his bison, Ted decided to grow his herd for commercial purposes, knowing that this once almost endangered animal would never become more than an exotic trophy species in the United States unless it had market value. To grow a herd, you need to buy more land, and that was the underlying reason for most of his purchases of western ranches. At last count he had thirty-seven thousand head of bison, 10 percent of the entire U.S. herd.

  The flagship ranch was and still is the Flying D, the one in Montana I told him not to buy. One afternoon Ted blindfolded me, drove me into the hills, led me out of the car, took off the blindfold, and said, “This is where we’ll build our home.” He pointed to a valley with a tiny stream running through it. “Right down there I’m going to create a lake that will reflect the Spanish Peaks. It will be our Golden Pond.” And that’s exactly what he did. He did the lake and I did the house. I wanted us to have at least one home that reflected me, with a ceiling under which no one before me had made love with him.

  Hardly a day went by that Ted and I weren’t riding over the Flying D’s wide expanse of rolling green hills, through forests of aspens and herds of elk, hundreds at a time. By now I had brought my three horses from Laurel Springs Ranch: two Arabians and a palomino. I like riding Arabs—they’re hot-blooded, all nerves, heart, and endurance, like Ted. You can feel their spirit under you.

  Then there was fly-fishing. The sport is so hard to master; my week at the Orvis Fly Fishing School notwithstanding, I often ended a day in despair, throwing myself screaming onto the banks. But since Ted was spending an average of a hundred days a year wetting a line, I felt I had to get good at it.

  Fly-fishing is endlessly
humbling. Every time I thought I’d graduated to the next level, Ted would buy a new ranch with harder-, faster-flowing water and smarter, bigger fish. But I learned why the sport is so important to him: It requires total Zenlike focus, and it is silent. You won’t catch much if you don’t want to be there or if you have other things on your mind. For Ted—who doesn’t handle stress well and is hard of hearing—fly-fishing is a balm. The sport requires you to be fully tuned in to every aspect of the natural world around you: the insects that may (or may not) be rising over the water, the position of the sun, where your shadow is being cast. Then there’s the underwater world you have to try to penetrate.

  There’s something sensual about this world. In his book Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis, Howell Raines describes its magic this way: “Imagine that cells scattered throughout the bone marrow—and particularly in the area of the elbows—are having subtle but prolonged orgasms and sending out little neural whispers about these events.” Maybe that’s why Ted loves the sport so much!

  Within a few years Ted had four ranches in Montana within two-hour drives of one another, each offering a different fishing experience. It was not unusual in the summers for us to have breakfast and early morning fishing at one, then drive two hours to another, where we’d have lunch and afternoon fishing, then drive to the third for dinner and evening fishing. My dear friend Karen Averitt, who had run one of my Workout studios in California and then my health spa at Laurel Springs Ranch (and then married Jim, my ranch hand/musician), had now, at my urging, moved with her family to Montana to cook and look after Ted’s houses. For those long summer months I marveled at how Karen managed to pack and unpack coolers, load them into her truck, and have the three meals ready in three different places—all in one day. It’s still going on, I might add. When Ted and I separated, Karen came to me and said, “Jane, you know I love you and always will, but Ted needs me more.” No kidding!