by Jane Fonda
Child sexual abuse, we have learned, is very much connected to adolescent pregnancy and parenthood. That is one reason G-CAPP and the Jane Fonda Center at the Emory University School of Medicine, which opened in 2001, work with emergency room doctors and nurses, pediatricians, juvenile court justices, and mental health experts to enable more frontline workers to identify and learn how to get appropriate treatment for sexual abuse. Studies have estimated that one out of four American females has been sexually abused. Four in ten women who have sex before age fifteen report that their first sexual experience was coerced. Sexual abuse survivors often begin voluntary sexual relationships earlier and are more likely to become pregnant before the age of eighteen. One study found that one-half to two-thirds of pregnant teens reported sexual abuse histories.
Sexual abuse is more than physical: It is a form of brainwashing. The message emblazoned on the mind of an abuse victim is that her only worth is her sex, that her body doesn’t belong to her, that saying no means nothing. She is stricken with what Oprah Winfrey, herself a victim of abuse, calls the “disease to please.” Sexual abuse eradicates the very skills that are needed for girls to protect themselves from pregnancy, STDs, and HIV/AIDS. Knowing my mother’s history with abuse, I found that this knowledge helped me immeasurably to understand and forgive her—and to want to help others heal. And, naturally, I also feel great passion for the work I do now because these issues have been at the center of my own life.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
YEARNINGS
Being unfaithful is like the outside of a fruit peeling.
It’s dry and bitter because it’s facing away from the center.
Being faithful is like the inside of the peeling,
wet and sweet. But the place for peelings
is the fire. The real inside is beyond “sweet”
and “bitter.” It’s the source of deliciousness.
—RUMI
I YEARNED FOR the “source of deliciousness,” in Rumi’s words, which for me means emotional intimacy and soul connection. We got there on occasion, Ted and I (I remember each time vividly, when he would look deeply into my eyes and I felt we were truly connecting), and sometimes when that happened I swear he’d get scared. It was as though emotional intimacy (as opposed to needy longings) had to be kept in check. Still, there were the lovemaking times when we would lock eyes and melt into one. There were the times when something would set us to laughing so hard we’d sink to the floor, like the night when our guffaws collapsed us at the foot of the Gone with the Wind staircase at his Avalon plantation and we had to crawl up to bed on hands and knees.
We had been going steady for almost two years when in 1991 we got married at Avalon on my fifty-fourth, winter solstice, birthday. Troy gave me away, and Vanessa was maid of honor.
A week later Ted was Time magazine’s Person of the Year.
A month later I discovered he was sleeping with someone else.
Life had taught me that men, at least those I tended to go for, operate by the Fornicato, ergo sum (I f——, therefore I exist) principle, but since there’d been plenty of Versailles moments of lovemaking with Ted and me, I’d rarely be away from him for more than a few hours, and since I knew he loved me, why?
The discovery was pure fluke. I was sitting in our car in the motor lobby of the CNN Center waiting to go to the airport with him. I saw a woman step up to valet parking. I’d seen her from behind, walking into the hotel two hours earlier. This time I saw her face and realized I knew her, but when I called out her name, she foolishly hid behind a pillar. I knew. In my gut, I knew. I called Ted’s office on the car phone, and when his assistant, Dee Woods, answered I put it to her straight: “He pulled a nooner today, didn’t he.” (This was Ted’s term for lunchtime dalliances.) She stammered and denied it (probably thinking, Hey, Fonda, didn’t I warn you?). She told me Ted was on his way down to meet me.
I remember sitting there, my heart pounding, my mind imploding. Ted was ashen when he got into the car, behind the wheel. That’s when I began hitting him about the head and shoulders with the car phone. Simultaneously, part of me was thinking that I’d never seen anyone do this in a movie and what a good scene it would make. (Is it only actors who think this way?) Then I poured my water bottle over his head and, crying and shaking, said, “I sure hope it was a great f——, because you just blew it with me. I’m outta here.” Hitting someone is not my style. But it also occurred to me that I’d never cared enough before to express this kind of balls-out rage. “Why did you do it? Haven’t things been great with us?”
He stopped at a red light and put his face into his hands. “Yes. Yes. I love you madly and our sex is great. I don’t know. I guess it’s . . . it’s like a tic”—that’s actually the word he used—“something I’ve gotten used to doing. I’ve always needed a backup in case something happens between us.” Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.
“Well, you’ve succeeded in making sure something would happen and now you’ll be stuck with your backup. I hope you’re happy.”
That evening I flew to Los Angeles, booked myself into the always calming Hotel Bel-Air, and holed up there for two weeks, telling no one where I was except Leni, the woman who had taught me the Workout and who had become my friend. Leni was Ted’s gym trainer when we were in California. She knew him, and given her street smarts I intuited that she would be the one to best midwife me through the anguish, which was just what she did. She would come to my room every day, sit by the bed, give me hard Coffee Nips candies (“They’re comforting”), and hold my hand while I cried and kvetched.
Ted suspected that Leni would know where I was and kept calling her, asking her to convince me to take him back. For two weeks I was determined that it was over. Then one day Leni came to my hotel room and said, “Think about it, Jane. If you don’t give him a second chance, someday you may see him happy, with another woman on his arm, and you’ll always wonder if that woman could have been you. He really wants you back. He says he’ll do anything.”
I called my former therapist (who was retired by then) and she recommended the people who had trained her, Beverly Kitaen Morse and Jack Rosenberg, who work with couples. I immediately made an appointment with them for a few days hence and asked Leni to arrange for Ted to come to Los Angeles and meet me in her apartment.
He flew from Atlanta the next day and came crawling into her living room on bended knee (which wasn’t saying much, since this was his supplicant gesture of choice whenever he had apologies to make, often combined with kissing of shoe and/or head in hands).
“Oh, get up, for heaven’s sake,” I said. “You look foolish and I know that doesn’t mean anything anyway. Half your business associates have seen you in that position at one time or another.” I then told him I would give him another chance on three conditions: that he would never betray me again, would never see the woman again, and would go into counseling with me. He agreed to all of it, and the next day we spent six consecutive, life-altering hours with Jack and Beverly and continued to see them off and on for eight years whenever we were in Los Angeles. Make it better.
For seven of those years (there’s that seven again) Ted kept his promise and never betrayed my trust, never went behind my back to exercise his “tic” (except for our last nine months together, when he sensed the marriage was doomed and was looking for a substitute). In fact, the day came when he said to someone who had heaped praise on him for something he’d done, “Stop, you’re being too monogamous.”
“Ted,” I said, “don’t you mean ‘magnanimous’?”
“Oh yes,” he replied proudly. “I didn’t use to be able to say the word monogamous at all, but now I use it so much, I say it by mistake. Pretty cute, huh?”
Before this early crisis in our relationship, I would feel Ted leave me energetically if an especially inviting woman came around. At those moments I would imagine the testosterone washing through his frontal lobe and obliterating all else. After the crisis, I swe
ar I could feel his antennae retracting.
On the steps of Avalon Plantation just after the wedding.
(© Barbara Pyle)
Our Hollywood wedding party given for us by (left to right) Barry and Carole Hirsch and Paula Weinstein and her husband, Mark Rosenberg.
Over the years, Ted and I were given many tools that helped smooth things out in our relationship. We developed better communication skills; we learned the importance of “skin time”—when we would lie together quietly, skin to skin, and have it not be about performing. I discovered that Ted abhorred being presented with faits accomplis, so I tried vigilantly to avoid presenting them. But, sadly, I learned that this was easier said than done. It was easy to consult and discuss things before doing them when the things were relatively insignificant and external, like moving a painting, changing dinnertime, buying a new saddle. But when later in the marriage they were decisions of critical importance to me—having to do with spiritual faith or with spending time with Vanessa when she was about to give birth—I would simply arrange to do what I felt I needed to do. I was accustomed to not having my feelings and needs respected by the men in my life, and I feared that if I opened up such decisions for discussion, I would be bullied out of them or they would be denied me outright—or love would be taken away. (As it turned out, my fears were well-founded.) Those times were very infrequent, but they ended up playing a role in the dissolution of our marriage.
While it was Ted’s dalliance that brought us into the therapists’ offices, I decided that in addition to our couples counseling, I wanted to work separately on my own issues. I sensed that my relationship with Ted, with all its challenges, was my opportunity to heal, and because I so wanted the marriage to work, I was willing to do the needed work on myself. Ted never did the same. Still, given how he was raised, it is extraordinary that he was willing to do as much as he did.
For those of us who harbor old ghosts (doesn’t everybody?), it is in our relationships that they surface, and then we are confronted with a choice: Either we learn to manage the ghosts or we settle for distance or instability. Some can learn the managing part on their own; some, like me, need the help of a trained professional to put the pieces back together.
I believe that the moment I met Ted, I intuited that this man was the one my heart could finally, fully, open to. I thought that all the elements were there for the kind of deep soul-to-soul love that I had never really had with anyone before. Ironically, this was why I fled from him at first and was so skittish when we started going together: I was frightened of the vulnerability that comes with the heart’s opening and was scared of being hurt and steamrolled. With Ted I was determined to put this fear behind me. I wanted us to be two fully authentic people meeting in mutual affection, communication, affirmation, and respect—and I assumed that’s what he wanted as well. After all, he was constantly talking about wanting intimacy and reminding me that I was afraid of it. It never occurred to me that he was too . . . well, not afraid of it so much as incapable of it.
The crisis with Ted was actually a blessing, because it had brought me to Beverly Morse, who turned out to be the perfect guide for the next part of my journey to . . . what shall I call it? Wholeness. Heartfulness. Authenticity. Integration? I had been living for so long in my head. What was essential for me now was to get back into my body, where I hadn’t been since adolescence—to be reembodied. I have discovered that there are different degrees of embodiment, and certainly, with Ted’s love, I made major forays in that direction. But Beverly’s method of using breathing techniques and bodywork—“somatic therapy”—took me to a deeper level. Over the years, with her help and a lot of hard work on my part, I was able to gain confidence. I learned to forgive my mother and so was able to forgive myself for my shortcomings; to know that I had done the best I could with what I had at any given time, just as my mother had; that I was no longer the woman with little love to give. I was learning to love myself. Baby steps at first, a beginning.
When I look back now over the landscape of my ten years with Ted, on the one hand I am struck by how happy I was much of the time, growing stronger and more confident every year. In part this was due to the personal work I was doing on myself, and in part it was because of the positive, centering role I knew I played in Ted’s life. Yet alongside this, behind the closed doors of the most intimate parts of our relationship, I still deafened myself to the signals from my body telling me how not-good I felt about many things he did that hurt me and about things I agreed to do to please him even if it went against my own well-being. I would drink to get numb and stuff my feelings in order to be sure Ted felt good. I would accommodate his needs (even when he didn’t ask me directly) out of fear of not being loved. I thought I had gotten over this “disease to please” with the ending of my marriage to Vadim. And, again, when the marriage to Tom ended, I thought, Well, I’ll never do that again. But this burying, this betraying, of myself was such an ingrained part of my modus operandi that in each new relationship I repeated the pattern, managed hardly to notice, and convinced myself that somehow the problems would just fade away. Besides, life with Ted was full and interesting, and denial was relatively easy.
I tried my best to understand and comply with his need to fill empty spaces with movement, activity, or the planning thereof. After all, it wasn’t as if I were a stay-at-home slouch myself. Actually we were rather well-balanced when it came to levels of energy. I still loved winging back and forth among his beautiful properties and being privy to the exciting events that swirled around us. I knew that together we were making a difference. I still found myself smiling when I heard him coming through the door. There were still times of rapture and melting. But the rigidity of our schedules and the constant moving had begun to empty me out.
We would no sooner arrive and settle into one of the Nebraska ranches, for example, than two days later we’d be off to the next one. Every time we’d walk into a new place, Ted would kiss me and say, “Welcome home,” a ritual that I found charming. And God knows I worked hard to make every place feel like home. But I felt homeless. Homeless with twenty houses—weird. When saleswomen would ask if the two dozen panties I’d just bought should be wrapped as gifts, I’d laugh. They were all for me, to be spread out among the different places.
We both got a kick out of the extremes of our life, from muddy jeans and waders to tuxedos and gowns and back again within less than twenty-four hours. But with all the yawing between extremes, there was little time to put down the roots I have always yearned for. Nor was I able to spend time on things that mattered deeply to me, like reading, working on the fledgling Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention, or, most important, spending time with my children. If I wanted to see them, I had to ask them to arrange to meet us somewhere along our travel route. I felt their disappointment acutely, and it pained me because I knew they were right in feeling that I was again losing myself, and them, just to make the marriage work. I would have liked Ted to understand and support such needs of mine. And he tried—but only when my needs didn’t interfere with his own. It’s not that I didn’t know what I needed to do; it was that I didn’t have the courage to go ahead and do it. I was not ready to enter an authentic relationship with myself if it meant risking my marriage.
Have you noticed how we are presented with the same lessons, over and over and over, before a tipping point is reached? The lessons we need to learn circle round us, closing in, until finally we are ready to take them in. Take them in. Those are the words that matter, because until I had embodied the lessons I was supposed to learn, absorbed them into the warp and woof of my being, they didn’t “take”; they remained a head trip and didn’t lead to changes in my behavior.
We’d been together eight years, married for six. Behaviors destructive to the relationship had gone unchallenged and become sacrosanct, like squatter’s rights. When I became resentful and would turn inward, he would fragment and yell that I was abandoning him. I had learned not to a
rgue, not to say a word, just to let him vent. It was his safety valve. In spite of this, on Ted’s scale of one to ten (he always rated things numerically), life hovered around six . . . in other words, more good than bad.
To complicate matters, I could feel myself yearning for spirituality in my life, something I had to keep to myself because of Ted’s hostility to anything metaphysical. I found myself increasingly interested in questions about God. What is God? What is it I feel is “leading” me? One day in south Georgia a conservative Christian asked me if I had been saved. He was not coming from a friendly place, and feeling his hostility, I chose not to engage. I let him know that I felt myself to be a spiritual person. But his question stuck with me.
I went to my friend Andrew Young, civil rights leader, former UN ambassador, and minister, and asked him if he thought I should be saved.
“You don’t need to,” he replied. “You’re already saved.” And he went on to tell me that the original Greek meaning of the word saved meant that a person was whole.
