Shakespeare’s As You Like It uses the metaphor of the stage to represent life; everyone is an actor, with entrances and exits. Shakespeare wrote that there are seven stages of existence, from the infant in his nurse’s arms to the last scene of all, second childishness―what the Bard called old age. An exception to “second childishness” is an octogenarian whose endless drive and Dorian Gray aging is, like a kaleidoscope, ever beautiful, ever changing.
In Zelig, Woody Allen plays the role of a human chameleon who takes on endless incarnations. The non-fictional counterpart to Leonard Zelig was a woman who has performed many roles―actress, activist, author―and was born into Hollywood royalty. However, in a nod to the observation that it is dangerous to let too much light into the castle, the mansion echoed unhappiness. Jane Fonda is the daughter of acclaimed actor Henry and socialite mother Frances, who committed suicide in a psychiatric hospital, probably from manic depression. The tragedy occurred when her daughter was twelve; Henry told her that her mother died from a heart attack, but Jane later learned the truth from a movie magazine. Jane expressed her devastation: “What was left of me could have been put into a thimble.” Growing up before the #MeToo movement, Jane suffered a childhood sexual assault in silence. In her memoir, Jane wrote that the emotional fallout from the attack was that she always felt a sense of disembodiment. Healing only took place at age sixty-two, at which time she made peace with her body that had always been a man magnet. For comfort from the dual tragedy, Jane turned to her father, but he was as nurturing as a block of ice. One of the few times he noticed her was when he commented that her legs were too heavy, a partial explanation for later battles with anorexia and bulimia. The young Jane became a broken doll, unable to appreciate that she was beautiful, smart, talented. Not surprisingly, Fonda went looking for love in all the wrong places.
As an eighteen-year-old in France, Fonda met Roger Vadim, who, considering his former relationships with Bridgette Bardot and Catherine Deneuve, exuded high-voltage sexuality. Playing on her insecurities, he convinced her to use her mother’s inheritance to pay off his gambling debts, and that her opposition to a ménage a trois was bourgeois. Utilizing her considerable acting talent, she faked enjoyment. In order to please him, she turned down starring roles in Bonnie and Clyde and Rosemary’s Baby for Barbarella, in which she tossed her hair as well as her vinyl bathing suit, the latter act exposing her beautiful physique. In 1968, Fonda appeared on the cover of Life magazine, proclaiming her an international sex symbol. Fonda changed that image with her next project, the Depression-era film They Shoot Horses Don’t They? Awakened to the decade’s activism, Jane felt it time to euthanize her marriage. The blinders dropped from her eyes, and she was no longer willing to put up with Roger’s drinking, threesomes, and using her as a walking bank account. The endgame arrived when she espoused causes near and dear to the heart of the ’60s, and Roger’s response was to dub her Jane of Arc.
Ms. Fonda went into her radical chic phase, learning about black voting rights and the Vietnam War from Marlon Brando. Jane wrote of her nascent activism, “Never underestimate what might be lying dormant beneath the surface of a back-combed blonde wearing false eyelashes.” After her hair epiphany, she traded her blonde mane for a brown shag and miniskirt for jeans, and jetted to New Delhi on a solo search for self. Fired with zeal, she then took off to San Francisco to support the takeover of Alcatraz. Squatting in a corner of the former prison yard, she smoked pot with Sioux Indian leaders who were understandably shocked at having a movie star in their midst. As the press focused on Fonda, rather than the plight of the Native Americans, the chief told her she could no longer be their spokesperson, as she did not know enough about the long history of white oppression. Undaunted, she set her sights on the Black Panthers. She lent them her credit card, and they promptly charged a car; she also lost $50,000 when she posted bail for a member who skipped town. The straw that broke Fonda’s back was their calling her a “white honkey bitch” and spurious rumors that she was sleeping with their head honcho. In her effort to better the world, she deposited her eighteen-month-old daughter, Vanessa, with Roger, thereby following in her father’s misbegotten parenting footsteps. At a feminist consciousness-raising session, she confided, “My biggest regret is I never got to f*** Che Guevara.”
At this point, Tom Hayden, hair in long braids, made his entrance, and within days, they were making love on the living-room floor. Wanting to live like “the people,” the couple moved into a blue-collar neighborhood replete with cockroaches. At the height of her fame in the mid ‘70s, Jane turned up on the doorstep of her ex-hubby, but not to engage in post-divorce amour. The star of Klute and The China Syndrome had come to do laundry. Tom had forbidden her to have a washing machine or dishwasher. Hayden tutored his paramour on the Pentagon Papers, and with his support, she travelled alone to North Vietnam, where she was asked to straddle an anti-aircraft gun for a photo-op. When she arrived back in the United States―in coolie hat and Vietnamese pajamas―she did so to the infuriated cries of protestors calling her Hanoi Jane. Even forty-six years later, NBC host Megyn Kelly brought up the hated epithet, though Fonda had issued an endless stream of mea culpas.
The untraditional couple took a traditional turn when they decided to get married in their living room, pungent with the scent of marijuana, while outside the Hell’s Angels, friends of her brother, Peter, encircled the house because of death threats. Tom and Jane named their son Troi after Nguyen Van Troi, a Vietcong “martyr” who had tried to assassinate Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. They later changed it to Troy.
Tom began to drink heavily and fooled around with the babysitter while the missus was off filming Julia. He stalked out of his wife’s screening of Coming Home, about a disabled veteran, angry because an actress was getting the spotlight rather than the victims. Jane looked for money to finance her husband’s next political campaign and launched an exercise enterprise, Workout, that spawned a $20-million fitness program. In lieu of appreciation, Hayden deemed the franchise “an exercise in vanity.” Resentment about being called Mr. Fonda ran deep. When Fonda was fifty-one, Hayden announced that, after sixteen years of marriage, he was in love with another woman. What was a two-time Oscar winner to do? Ms. Fonda responded by throwing his belongings out the window in garbage bags. That helped a little, she said.
Jane embarked on her third radical act―as a trophy wife, at age fifty-four―when she took a final walk down the aisle with right-wing billionaire Ted Turner. The lure need not have been his wealth, as she possesses her own $100-million-dollar piggy-bank. His first-date pick-up line was mentioning that he had friends who were Communists; his nickname for her: “Fonda-ling.” When Jane first succumbed to his sexual advances, he yelled, “Hot dog!” She described him as a hyperactive Rhett Butler in need of Ritalin, a man who bought ranches faster than Fonda could apply makeup. The consummate narcissist, he banged his head against the wall when he perceived that his wife loved him as much as she loved Jesus. In her memoir, she wrote that Turner offered “Fountains-of-Versailles-and-fireworks sex.” On the downside, he informed her that she should abandon her career because her last two movies were “real dogs.” He added that the only negative in their relationship was her advanced age (the same as his own). The common denominator he shared with her former husband was a mental block against monogamy. After she discovered that he had taken a turn into infidelity in his office a month after their vows, she beat him on his shoulders with the car phone and poured bottled water on his head. Fonda moved into her daughter’s house in Atlanta, even though that meant leaving a twenty-three-room palace.
In 2018, the eighty-one-year-old Fonda starred in Book Club, a geriatric version of Sex and the City, in which four senior ladies want to reinvigorate their sex lives after reading Fifty Shades of Grey. Fonda played a Samantha-like character, a leopard-skin-clad businesswoman, who scheduled sex devoid of commitment. The problem with producing the movie was that studio executives insisted on using actresses in their late forties. However, the creators persevered and found an independent company to finance the film. Jane declared that “ageism is alive and well” in the industry. Fonda’s body is alluring as ever, and her face has escaped the ravages of time. She admitted to a facelift, undertaken because it “brought her ten extra years in the industry.” The procedure probably did extend her screen time, as how many other eighty-year-old women have a hit comedy series on Netflix (Grace and Frankie), as well as a feature film, a documentary on her life about to air on HBO, and no indication of stopping any time soon? In her spare time, the lithe lady does yoga and Pilates and has made a new series of workout videos called “Prime Time,” geared for older people. Jane admits she can no longer perform the fitness regime of yesteryear because of joint replacements. She says of the collateral damage of aging: “I have a fake hip, a fake knee, and I’ve had a number of back surgeries, so I’m sort of half-metal and half-bionic now. I have osteoarthritis and getting in and out of a car is a challenge. But I feel lucky that I did a lot of fitness work earlier in my life because it means I’m stronger now.” Fonda entitled her memoir My Life So Far—a nod to her focus on the future―and wrote that her main form of exercise is jumping into things “before I really know what I’m doing. It’s called a leap of faith. It’s what keeps me young, too. That’s my new workout.”
Last year, she worked once more with Robert Redford, with whom she had starred in the 1967 film Barefoot in the Park. It centered on their fictional roles as intoxicated young newlyweds in New York who seldom left their bed. In the 2017 film, Our Souls at Night, they played widowed grandparents who get together to ward off the demons of loneliness. Although she had always harbored a romantic soft spot for Redford, she said, “I’m eighty. I’ve closed up shop down there.” Her self-imposed celibacy indicated there would be no more Fun with Dick and Jane, to borrow the title of her 1977 film.
Despite Jane’s three husbands and innumerable encounters of the close kind, in the end, her heart always belonged to her father. In 1981, she produced On Golden Pond―a story about an adult daughter trying to reconcile with her dad before his passing. Jane’s hope was to get Henry the golden statuette that had always proved elusive. True to form, offstage, he would not discuss the emotional intimacy they shared on camera. When she needed succor during filming, she received it from costar Katherine Hepburn, who deemed Henry Fonda “cold, cold, cold.” Jane collected the Oscar for Dad in what she called “the happiest moment of my life,” and she delivered it to him at his home, as he was too ill to attend the ceremony. Sitting in his wheelchair, he did not say anything about it or offer a word of thanks. Life would have turned out far different for Jane if Henry Fonda had been Atticus Finch.