Jane Fonda Flexes Her Muscles : The actress, whose ‘Old Gringo’ traveled a long road to the screen, talks about business in Hollywood

The game to play with Jane Fonda is the truth game. You say a word, and she gets to define it.

Hollywood .

“A business wrapping its mouth around an art form.”

Power.

“Using whatever weapons you have at the time.”

Survival .

“Genetics, willpower, strength, foolhardiness.”

Sexuality.

“You can’t be a movie star without it--and it’s a big burden.”

There is a Hollywood axiom that an actress is a little bit more than a woman, and an actor is a little bit less than a man--and this seems the apt time to confront Jane Fonda with it. At 51 she’s got a certain playing field to herself. There are stars who are younger and actresses who are older but there’s only one Fonda, like her or not. Offscreen Fonda and her estranged husband, Tom Hayden, were an icon couple of the decade. Onscreen, later this year is “Stanley & Iris,” her star vehicle with Robert De Niro, written by the much-respected team of Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch and directed by Martin Ritt (“Norma Rae”). Opening on Friday is her much-postponed $25 million “Old Gringo”--the “first bicultural big Hollywood movie,” as Fonda calls it--after eight years and four suites of executive shuffles. Can Jane Fonda be hurt professionally by whatever might (or might not) happen opening weekend? Is she woman enough to take the consequences?

She stretched the Fonda legs over a brass coffee table in a Westwood hotel suite the other afternoon and thought about it. “Can I be hurt professionally?” she asked. “No . . . If it doesn’t do well, it makes you sit down and think, ‘What did I do wrong?’ But I feel the same way about this movie as people feel about ‘Out of Africa.’ When it was all over with--all the talk about whether or not it made money--you only had to look at the international grosses. It went into profit. I believe that will be the case with this one too. (“Out of Africa” also happened to win the Academy Award for best picture.)

“It’s so hard to do a movie you can’t put into one sentence,” worried the actress. “ ‘Old Gringo’ is a movie about a woman who takes responsibility. It says you have to own yourself, your own power. This woman I play--this spinster, this virgin--doesn’t do that at the start of the film. If you don’t own yourself, it doesn’t count. I learned that to make a movie like this, you have to be fired up.”

You have to be Jane Fonda. You have to be patient. Nine years ago came the first manuscript of the Carlos Fuentes novel “Old Gringo.” Fonda received it in New Hampshire on the “On Golden Pond” location. What she read was “almost surrealistic . . . not a story begging to be filmed.” The studio saga behind this film also borders on surrealistic; it begs to be filmed as a documentary.

One of the “understoods” in Hollywood is that nobody at a studio interferes with Fonda, ever. Say it, and she shoots back a look of disbelief. “It’s not true. It’s their job to interfere. One of the real tenets of Hollywood now is that it’s big business and high art and Coca-Cola and Wall Street and major multinational companies. (Like Sony, which last week completed a $3.4-billion deal to buy Columbia.) It’s important to understand those dynamics and demands. It’s part of the pressure of the movie business to understand the amalgam, and if you don’t--then get out of the business. I resent people who are negative and bitter about corporate demands. Work within the system or be quiet. Modern life is about corporate pressure, and you know what?” she added, 30 years (and 40 movies) of her stardom showing, “corporate pressure has always been part of the game. The only people who moan are the people who can’t play.”

The players here are like a cast of characters from Ernest Lehman’s “Executive Suite.” Who else but Fonda could navigate her way through four studio regimes? “On all (five) films I’ve produced, I’ve never been the actual producer,” she said. “That would be acting like God, and I can’t do it. But if I’m needed, I can do both. After 30 years at this, I am going to speak up.”

And be listened to?

“Yup. I can wear different hats, and I can switch gears-- whoosh! zam! zap ! But somebody else is doing a lot of what I seem to be doing. One example is my workout business, which somebody else runs. I’m only paying attention to it between movies.”

Somebody else runs, and ran, Columbia Pictures, too, through all the regimes in which “Old Gringo” survived. The perception is that “Old Gringo” is the only major picture to have lived through both the David Puttnam and Dawn Steel eras--based solely on Fonda’s strength as a star. And the studio’s craving for relationship with stars. But the movie in fact is older than that--it predates Puttnam.

“It goes back to Frank Price! Before Frank Price!” Fonda said the name of the former Columbia president like it was a blast from the past. (Price, who was also formerly Universal’s president, has been either in professional limbo or on the brink of an announcement; the upcoming “The Bear” is the first film from his Columbia-based Price Entertainment Co.)

Price wasn’t even at Columbia in 1978 when Fonda was on holiday in Mexico City “searching for a vehicle. One day I saw a tilted cathedral in a central plaza, and it was hollow. Then I saw there were excavations going on, and it was a revelation to me--it was an Aztec pyramid. It hits you in the stomach like a fist--the way the foreigners were pouring cement over this Mexican cathedral.”

Fonda was just passing 40 when the Fuentes book, then called “Frontiers,” arrived in New Hampshire. She sees the timing as “synchronicity, which is something I’ve had almost my whole career. ‘Golden Pond’ appeared at the time I wanted to do something with my father; ‘China Syndrome’ . . . Three Mile Island.” Fonda’s movies do tend to jibe with headlines, almost like clockwork. So the fact of “Coming Home” taking five years to develop, or “Dollmaker” taking eight years, doesn’t throw her.

“Old Gringo” didn’t throw Frank Price either because, as Fonda puts it, “He could conceive of this as a very small art film. The thinking was, ‘We’ll let her develop it. It’s not going to cost a lot of money.’ ”

Flash forward two years. Price is out and Guy McElwaine, a former agent, is in. It’s in such executive shuffles that movies die quiet (or loud) deaths--new regimes don’t want old ideas. It’s a moment in which a studio cleans house. Fonda, a pragmatist, understands this. She also knows her value as a star to a Guy McElwaine or a Frank Price; it’s not for nothing that it’s Fonda, and not some other actress, who for years has been developing a version of “All About Eve” with herself in the role of the quintessential star Margo Channing. (Question: Couldn’t Fonda’s actress-niece Bridget play Eve Harrington?)

“Guy wanted me to do ‘Agnes of God,’ ” Fonda said without any emotion. “So I said, ‘OK, Guy, I’ll do “Agnes of God.” ’ But in return I want to hire a new writer for ‘Old Gringo.’ ”

She paused purposely. “It was a semi- quid pro quo. “

Were they indulging Fonda, these men?

“Absolutely. But I don’t care what their motivation is. My former partner, Bruce Gilbert, and I spent the first five years of ‘Dollmaker’ trying to get it made as a feature. Then we saw ‘Roots’ on TV and changed our minds overnight. ‘Dollmaker’ was right for TV. You have to learn to shift gears.”

Quickly. “The day after I won my second Academy Award (note the precision of the timing), I went to see (then ABC broadcast chief) Tony Thomopolous about ‘Dollmaker.’ How was he going to say no to me? This is how you get projects made. In little increments. You don’t go straight ahead, you go in toeholds. It’s like climbing a mountain. You never look straight up.”

You also don’t look away, ever. After Fonda finished ‘Agnes,’ McElwaine left Columbia (he’s an agent again, at International Creative Management) and Englishman David Puttnam arrived. The switch was fortuitous for Fonda.

“The day I pitched ‘Gringo’ to Puttnam, I knew he was the right person for the movie. It was his kind of story. He liked the idea. And very important here: He wasn’t afraid of using a foreign director. . . . So we got a leg up at the next level of studio development.”

It didn’t hurt that Luis Puenzo, the Argentine director whom Fonda wanted for “Old Gringo,” had just done “The Official Story,” a critically acclaimed Argentinian film which won an Oscar for best foreign film.

“Luis came out of nowhere,” said Fonda, recalling how she had told her partner and “Old Gringo” producer Lois Bonfiglio that Puenzo had made only one movie. “Lois said to me, ‘Yes, but it’s a very sophisticated movie.’ He barely spoke English. But he went off and read Carlos’ book, and came back with a 25-page . . . I don’t know what to call it . . . an analysis of the novel. I saw this story as a metaphor for not accepting individual differences. We seem not to be able to look at another culture with respectful eyes anymore. The second half of what Luis wrote was a proposal for the structure of the film, and it was the most brilliant thing I’ve ever read. I took it to David Puttnam. Luis Puenzo never got any money at that point, by the way.”

Puttnam lasted a rocky 12 months in Hollywood, and most of his movies were written off by Columbia as bad judgment calls. Two years ago he was replaced as Columbia president by Dawn Steel. “We were relatively pregnant with this movie when Dawn came on,” Fonda said. “Sets were being built. Dawn could have ended it. She’s extremely strong. She said, ‘OK, go ahead, but you get this amount of money and this amount of time. And don’t come back for more.’ ”

Yet rumors persist that Fonda went back, and back again. “Oh, yes, well we needed three more days. There was a scene for which we needed more time. It’s the scene where the little girl wakes me. So in that case I got on the phone to Dawn and she agreed. She talks tough and straight. The fact that she’s tight about money and scheduling is healthy. It forces you not to be indulgent. She flatly said no to an extra week of hacienda shots we wanted.”

Fonda has other gripes, though, in a larger sense about “certain personalities in our community being somewhat cavalier in terms of accounting. There doesn’t seem to be any logic when you look at how much movies cost, and how often they go way over budget. It’s totally incomprehensible to outsiders.”

Example: Fonda’s workout business. “It’s a small service business and the woman who runs it is from a non-entertainment area. If you asked her, she would say that some people in Hollywood are out of control and irrational. Because we also went into the video business--and because I am who I am--and because the video business interfaces with entertainment entities . . . this woman from the outside gets to see inside. I think what she sees is that very often we are making movies over the backs of a bunch of dinosaurs.”

Fonda wasn’t finished. “Can you hear the hysteria in my voice?” she wanted to know. “Look, I don’t chafe at corporate involvement with movies. This was not a small movie; it had its own rhythm and restrictions--we had to toe a line. The new employers are people with their asses on the line from major multinational companies, and I owe them a certain kind of responsibility. Because I’m strong I can handle that. But to say that the business is totally corrupted is silly.”

Play the truth game again and say two words to Fonda: The business.

“A strange amalgam of art and commerce. People behind the money are dealing with people who are artists. It’s a different gestalt. Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda come along with a movie called ‘Easy Rider’ and it makes a fortune. So some young film makers who are not Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda come along and get a chance. And nothing happens. You can’t feed it to a computer.”

All the therapy and all the successful ventures and video income and political controversy--all the staying power--don’t mean you don’t remain vulnerable to early issues. With all her power she seems frightened still. That’s what’s so startling about Fonda: Tell her about reading “Haywire,” the memoir by her childhood friend Brooke Hayward, and she doesn’t back off. She knows the Jane Fonda quotes you’re talking about: “There’s one about those two women--Margaret Sullavan and my mother--committing suicide. All that bottled-up rage inside you with nowhere to go.”

So the rage doesn’t go away? Her look says no--the rage can be triggered at the drop of an Adidas. Both Margaret Sullavan and her mother were married to Henry Fonda; Brooke Hayward’s sister Bridget died early and tragically, and her brother Bill was hospitalized for mental illness. And at Vassar it was Brooke Hayward, not Jane Fonda, everyone expected to become the movie star. (Hayward made the cover of Life on her 16th birthday--it took Fonda a few more years.)

“Life experience teaches you finally the survival is in yourself,” Fonda said firmly. She played with the buttons on her red linen blazer. Some very bright journalists call her a control freak, but she’d prefer the word survivor . “I’ve got a third of my life left, and it’s mine. To act out those early family dynamics takes so much out of you.”

The early memories she’s most famous for are the tomboy memories, the climbing and hiking around Tigertail Road in Brentwood, her father being the gentleman farmer and Sunday painter and also a movie star. “I was always racing around the hills, either being a cowboy or an Indian. One or the other. It was sort of schizophrenic.” And scary? “Maybe. But maybe if you are not scared, it’s not interesting . . . In Mexico, on the set, I was sitting at (co-star) Greg Peck’s feet asking him why we put ourselves through this. And he said something that made so much sense: He said Walter Matthau is happiest when he’s gambled everything, and lost it. It’s something akin to bases loaded in the ninth inning . . . Again this is a contradiction in me, because neither of my parents was that open or that much of a gambler.”

The mother-father memories are worth bringing up, because Fonda isn’t used to being asked about them--because of her mother’s suicide, it’s a taboo. But she seems willing to go to a specific memory.

“Them getting ready to go to a party, and me being awfully young, watching them get dressed. My mother wore clothes beautifully. She . . . cared greatly about her hair, and her appearance, and her jewelry, and the effect could be extraordinary. And I remember my father standing there in his tuxedo . . . “

And didn’t young Lady Jane (as Barbara Stanwyck called her) want to wear her mother’s clothes, like every other little girl? Her face spoke volumes. “I wore his clothes,” she said, as if it was the most natural thing. If the Fonda power drive that fascinates Hollywood and the rest of the country comes from her mother’s death--and the unappealing way she found out, years later, at boarding school--she couldn’t care less.

“It may never absolutely go away, that memory,” she said, “and it may not be necessary that it go away. You aim for forgiveness. Some people go under and remain damaged--not that I don’t believe I’m damaged. I’m not pretending I’m not damaged.”

The subtext here is “Deny the damage, deny the stardom.” The actresses who accept their contradictions at the core--Meryl Streep, Mia Farrow, Debra Winger--are the ones the public connects to. Fonda said if she wasn’t acting, she’d “probably be institutionalized.”

“But I’m extremely strong,” Fonda repeated, lest anyone forgot. “Which is not necessarily good. I have tremendous will. I am not going to be destroyed. I’m going to survive. I’m not my image; people who have these superwoman images are not that way at all. I’m stubborn, but the people who are close to me know that my main characteristic is that I’m open--which is a contradiction. But if you want to grow up, or change, badly enough, the idea of change can penetrate your being. I have a strange lack of rigidity. For the last nine months, I’ve been free-falling through space.”

Remind her that in 1964 she was voted at Harvard the human being most likely to become a thing, and she laughs. (When writer and Harvard professor John Hallowell invented the truth game in the late ‘60s, he admits it was partly with Fonda in mind.) She’s been called a lot of things, after all. But now she’s facing her 50s and a divorce, after 17 years, from Tom Hayden. And she’s talking about it, on the air, to people like Connie Chung. Was it the back-to-back movies that wrecked the marriage to the state assemblyman?

“If a marriage is working,” she said carefully, “then a movie or two movies can be a strain. But movies don’t break a working marriage.”

So no regrets? “If I’d known up front how long this movie was going to take . . . I don’t know . . . I loved sitting with Luis and Lois on couches in smoke-filled hotel rooms saying things like ‘Yeah, let’s put her in a close-up here.’ So, yeah, I guess I’m comfortable being a movie star.”

What about directing? “I’m not comfortable with the idea of ever directing. I like to be directed. I still get frightened working, I still get cramps a lot. Acting hasn’t become easier or more comfortable. I can make decisions and choices, but I never want to be the buck-stops-here person.”

What about this ultimate Hollywood child writing about Hollywood?

“Writing about it?” she said like it was a terrible idea. “I have enough trouble talking about Hollywood. Because I never know what’s true and what isn’t.”