No ordinary Jane

Writing books is probably not what Jane Fonda will be remembered for. As for the movies, there were 41 of them, from “Tall Story” in 1960 to “Monster-In-Law” in 2005. Depending on your age, they may have meant something strong to you or not. But Hanoi Jane, now there’s a woman you’ll remember. Is she an American icon or isn’t she? Is she a feminist or isn’t she? The answer lies somewhere between “Barbarella” and “On Golden Pond”; between Ted Turner and Tom Hayden; between the mega-million-dollar business of the Jane Fonda “Workout” and living with a mattress on the floor in Venice Beach. Oh woman, you’ve got to choose. Or do you?

Fonda has written her memoir, “My Life So Far,” in three acts, titled “Gathering,” which takes us from 1948 (when she was 11) through 1968; “Seeking,” from 1968 through 1997, when she turned 60; and “Beginning,” from 1997 to the present. It belongs alongside the memoirs of Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Marilyn French and Katharine Graham -- one of those books that come out maybe once every five years or more. Why? Here’s one possible answer: American political history makes very little room -- and grudgingly -- for women. The ones by politicians (such as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton) rarely reveal much. The others tend to fall too squarely into one of several pigeonholes, rendering them too academic or too narrow in scope. But Fonda runs the gamut. To hold this book in your hands is to be astonished by how much living can be packed into 60-plus years.

Hers was a childhood full of lessons on hardening, on being, as she confesses, “on the winning team,” which in Fonda’s family meant staying in her pathologically cold father’s good graces. Being thin, having a perfect body were of primary importance. A woman, Jane learned from her parents’ relationship, “has to twist herself into a pretzel,” not let her husband “see who she really is.” “You disgust me,” her father would say of her tears or other emotional outbursts.

When Jane was 12, her 42-year-old mother slashed her own throat with a razor. Jane’s reward for her inability to cry: compliments on her bravery from teachers and family friends. A few months after his wife’s death, Henry Fonda married Susan Blanchard, who at 22 was only nine years older than her new stepdaughter and 23 years younger than her new husband. While they were still on their honeymoon, Jane’s brother Peter, then 11, shot himself with an antique .22-caliber pistol. Jane credits Blanchard, whose marriage to Henry lasted seven years, with teaching her everything she knew (and it came in handy) about being a successful stepmother.

In her 13th summer, Jane began seriously hating her own body. (This “disembodiment” resulted in bulimia -- “two of dad’s five wives suffered from bulimia,” she writes -- and an addiction to Dexedrine that persisted well into Fonda’s 40s. It was not until her third act, she writes, that she was able to “reinhabit” her body.) She was sent to the Emma Willard boarding school in Troy, N.Y., then attended Vassar College, but she dropped out and convinced her father to send her to Paris to study painting. This was a time of deep depression, “an existential mourning for the lack of meaning in my life, a yearning for the emergence of an authentic self I wasn’t sure existed,” she writes.

Back in the States, she found meaning in the acting classes she took with Lee Strasberg. In 1959, she began her acting career by working on a movie version of the Broadway play “Tall Story,” costarring Anthony Perkins. During this period, “I was bingeing and purging sometimes eight times a day.” In 1963, Fonda returned to France to work on a film with director Rene Clement, “Les Felins.”

In Paris, Fonda met and fell in love with Roger Vadim, who was fresh from a breakup with Catherine Deneuve (after his marriage to Brigitte Bardot). Vadim was a Parisian style leftist intellectual, horrified by anything that smacked of the bourgeois; fond of alcohol and threesomes. She writes candidly about her efforts to rid herself of all bourgeois tendencies, like jealousy. She writes about their sexual escapades as a kind of self-betrayal, yet another form of disembodiment. “So adept was I at burying my real feelings and compartmentalizing myself that I eventually had myself convinced that I enjoyed it.”

Then came 1968, a pivotal year: She became pregnant with daughter Vanessa; but something else crept into her bloodstream. Reports of the Vietnam War, unfiltered through U.S. media, shocked many of her friends and colleagues in France. Her “mentor,” actress Simone Signoret, brought Fonda to a Paris antiwar rally to hear Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and others. “I felt embarrassed for my country, and I also wanted to go home,” she wrote. These feelings coincided with the dissolution of her marriage to Vadim: “I knew that if I threw myself heart and soul into the anti-war effort, a return to the permissive, indolent life I shared with Vadim would be unthinkable.”

In this period, Fonda also read Jonathan Schell’s “The Village of Ben Suc” and “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” She gave birth and began working on the film “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” She returned to California and was introduced, through actors Al Lewis and Marlon Brando, to the Black Panther Party. She cut her hair (abandoning the big blond hair look of all of Vadim’s former wives) and emerged with the style-setting brown shag that carried her through her first few rallies, protests and arrests and the movie “Klute.” She became friends with LaNada Means Boyer, a young Bannock woman who exposed Fonda to some of the problems faced by Native Americans.

Was she an impressionable rich kid or a true listener, a lightning rod for change in American culture? Fonda describes this period as a kind of awakening. New motherhood slowed her down, made her feel her own loneliness, made the suffering of others more interesting and community organizations more appealing. Changing from a “noun to a verb,” she calls it. “A verb is active and less ego-oriented. Being a verb means being defined by action, not by title.” But in her enthusiasm, she admits, she went too far. “I wanted to be taken seriously, and I mistakenly thought that the more militant I appeared, the more seriously I’d be taken.” In 1970, she took to the road, visiting GI coffeehouses, hearing of their experiences, marching, speaking. It was on this trip that the FBI began its investigations of Fonda. She was arrested on drug charges that were later dropped. And she met Tom Hayden.

“He appeared out of the darkness, an odd figure with a long braid, beaded headband, baggy khaki pants, and rubber sandals of the type I’d been told the Vietnamese made out of the tires of abandoned U.S. vehicles,” Fonda writes. She was immediately self-conscious, worried that her lifestyle seemed elitist. She was clearly awed by the antiwar activist’s intelligence. For better or worse, the period that follows seems by far the happiest in her life. True, she did drop her own career, at least in the beginning of their relationship. True, she did start her business to finance his campaign for the California Assembly and state Senate. But there is no mistaking the wistful tone in this portion of the memoirs. Fonda was determined, at the birth of their son, Troy, to be a better mother than she had been to Vanessa (who shuttled back and forth between her father in Paris and her mother on the road). If marriage had come to mean the pretzel shape her own mother squeezed into, the marriage with Tom didn’t seem to demand so much contortion. She could be herself, body and mind. “I loved his playfulness, the Irish juiciness that brought welcomed moisture to what I felt was my arid Protestant nature.” At the same time, she now realizes that Tom’s strong ideas about the world, his compelling “big picture,” was not necessarily her big picture. “It would take me thirty years and then some,” she writes, “to discover my own, gender-grounded narrative.”

In 1972, Fonda took the fateful trip to Hanoi. She devotes a chapter to this episode, which perhaps has engraved her in the American consciousness more deeply than any of her films. Carried away by singing a song she had memorized for the Vietnamese people, Fonda found herself in the seat of a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun, without really knowing, she writes, how she got there. “I hardly even think about where I am sitting,” she writes. Cameras flash. The rest is history. “I realize that it is not just a U.S. citizen laughing and clapping on a [North] Vietnamese antiaircraft gun: I am Henry Fonda’s privileged daughter who appears to be thumbing my nose at the country that has provided me these privileges. More than that, I am a woman, which makes my sitting here even more of a betrayal.” Yet her efforts with the Vietnam vets, in particular a meeting with those in Waterbury, Conn., are a triumph of feminine intelligence, empathy, will and instinct.

After Troy’s birth, Fonda resumed her career, determined to merge her two worlds with films such as “Coming Home,” “The China Syndrome,” “9 to 5” and “The Dollmaker.” She and Hayden bought a 200-acre ranch north of Santa Barbara, where they established a performing arts camp for children of all backgrounds that operated from 1977 to 1991. In 1979, with partner Leni Cazden, she began creating the workouts and videos that would be known worldwide as “doing Jane.”

By the mid-1980s, she writes, $17 million in workout proceeds had funded Hayden’s campaigns and the statewide nonprofit Campaign for Economic Democracy. Both Hayden and Fonda were fighting addictions -- alcohol for him and persistent food addictions, bulimia and Dexedrine for her. Both were having sexual affairs. Fonda made a string of unsuccessful movies in the 1980s, including “Old Gringo” and “Agnes of God.” She got breast implants, to which “Tom was adamantly opposed,” she writes. In 1988, when Fonda was 51, Tom announced he was in love with another woman. “It wasn’t him I missed as much as an amorphous us, the ‘usness.’ ” Troy was 15, Vanessa was 20.

Fonda is careful not to frame the three acts in her life using the men she was with, though the lazy reader will ignore the more subtle changes that led her to leave marriages and prepared the emotional groundwork for new relationships. Still, Ted Turner makes no sense: For a woman who spent so many decades finding a voice (her voice?) to be silenced by his enormous personality seems a detour. He was, she says in describing their courtship, “like one of those male birds in a nature documentary that puffs and struts.” “Once again,” she admits, “I seemed to have become someone new because of a man.” Charmed by his outspoken honesty, his love of nature and even his inability to pronounce the word “monogamy,” a 54-year-old Fonda agreed in 1991 to marry Turner. A month after their wedding, she discovered that he was sleeping with someone else. Fonda forgave him. She took over the Turner Foundation and worked tirelessly on issues of population control, children’s health, adolescent reproductive health and sexuality. She started the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention. For her 60th birthday, Turner gave her a $10-million foundation.

But Fonda was ready for a change. Two years later, she moved out and went to live with Vanessa and her grandson Malcolm in Atlanta. Out came the breast implants (to which Troy said: “Mom! You’re back in proportion again!”).

“All my life,” she writes in the final chapter, titled “Leaving My Father’s House,” “I had been a father’s daughter ... seeing myself through the eyes of men and accommodating them on the deepest, invisible level (while seeming to do the contrary) and, in so doing, delivering a part of myself to a world that bifurcates head and heart.” Why didn’t she become a feminist sooner? “I erroneously thought it required male bashing,” she writes.

The photos in “My Life So Far” reveal not one but many different women living in Fonda’s body. The chubby-cheeked daddy’s girl, the hollow-eyed supermodel, the blond director’s wife, the hippie, the natural woman (by far the most beautiful) and the overdressed, overstuffed Southern belle. Mother, actress, daughter, activist. Was it shallowness, shape-shifting that allowed Fonda to cross so many boundaries? In “Composing a Life,” Mary Catherine Bateson’s mind-altering book about how women create nonlinear lives so often more fascinating than their male counterpart’s, interrupted (thank God) by babies, aging parents, careers and strange hormonal goings on, the very lack of continuity is celebrated.

Fonda, resisting the pretzel shape of her mother’s life, flowed in and through a certain period of American history like water, like a river; shallow in parts, deep in others. An icon, it seems, is really just a noun. Jane Fonda is most definitely a verb.