Fonda Gets Golda Meir Award

Photographers wanted to photograph Jane Fonda. The press wanted to talk to her. The guests wanted to meet her and be photographed with her and be interviewed with her.

Someone asked designer Arnold Scaasi if he knew her.

“I don’t know Jane,” said Scaasi, slowly surveying the human beehive that buzzed around the star, “but she’s very busy.”

Indeed. Fonda had flown in to Los Angeles Monday morning to accept the 1990 Golda Meir Fellowship award from the Women’s Committee, Builders of Scopus of Hebrew University, for her public service works, as well as her work in the arts.

The award was given to her at a luncheon and Scaasi fashion show at the Regent Beverly Wilshire hotel that drew about 350 people--almost all women--to the hotel’s ballroom.

Too rushed to slip into her usual Versace ensemble, Fonda wore an unwrinkled sage green pantsuit, black tank top, black pumps and a silver and turquoise necklace.

“I think the work they’re doing at Hebrew University, educating the immigrants coming to Israel from the Soviet Union, is fantastic,” said Fonda during a brief media free-for-all that had most of the guests peering across the room at the commotion while sipping coffee and cocktails.

In an unprepared speech, she spoke extensively of her work in trying to free Ida Nudel, a Jewish Soviet refusenik and economist who, after exile in Siberia, was finally allowed to emigrate to Israel in 1987. Fonda had traveled to the Soviet Union in 1984 to meet with Nudel in a collaborative effort to free her.

“I don’t know what she got out of our meeting,” Fonda continued, “but I know what I got out of it; one of the things I learned from her was never give up. Nothing is impossible. . . . For years after I left the Soviet Union she kept speaking out, and putting herself in danger. I still didn’t believe it would ever happen, but she knew it would.

“Thanks not to me, but to Armand Hammer, and to you, she is now in Israel. That’s what’s so beautiful--it’s never one famous person in Hollywood who’s responsible. It’s because there’s an international movement of people who are concerned about the plight of Soviet Jews.”

Proceeds from the lunch (individual tickets were $500) will fund 150 Golda Meir Fellows at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the Israeli counterparts of Rhodes and Fulbright scholars.

Fonda’s speech was followed by a showing of the fall 1990 Scaasi fashions.

In the audience (watching models slink down the runway wearing Dalmatian-spotted coats and holding Dalmatian dogs on leashes) were women’s committee chairman Marilynn Gersten; luncheon chairmen Della Koenig, Leona Palmer and Wendy Goldberg; honorary chairman Barbara Davis (with daughter Nancy Zarif), and 1985 fellowship award winner Jane Morgan Weintraub.

Also: Jane Seymour, Cyd Charisse, Constance Towers, Rosemarie Stack, Lee Minnelli, Eva Gabor, Jill St. John, Cecilia Peck and Lillian Silbert.