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Summary
Summary
Bosworth goes behind the image of an American superwoman, revealing Jane Fonda--more powerful and vulnerable than ever expected--whose struggles for high achievement, love, and successful motherhood mirror the conflicts of a generation of women.
In the hands of this seasoned, tenacious biographer, the evolution of one of the century's most controversial and successful women becomes nothing less than a great, enthralling American life.
Jane Fonda emerged from a heartbreaking Hollywood family drama to become a '60s onscreen ingénue and then an Oscar-winning actress. At the top of her game she risked all, rising against the Vietnam War and shocking the world with a trip to Hanoi. Later, while becoming one of Hollywood's most committed feminists, she financed her husband Tom Hayden's political career in the '80s with exercise videos that began a fitness craze and brought in millions of dollars. Just as interesting is Fonda's next turn, as a Stepford Wife of the Gulfstream set, marrying Ted Turner and seemingly walking away from her ideals and her career.
Fonda's is a story of the blend of deep insecurity, magnetism, bravery, and determination that fuels the most inspiring and occasionally infuriating public lives. Finally here is Fonda and all the women she's been.
Author Notes
PATRICIA BOSWORTH, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair , has known Jane Fonda since they were students at the Actors Studio and has been writing about her since 1968. Bosworth has also written acclaimed biographies of Montgomery Clift, Diane Arbus, and Marlon Brando. She lives in New York.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Years after Fonda's bestselling autobiography, My Life So Far (2005) comes this comprehensive biography by her longtime friend and well-known biographer. Fonda and Bosworth met when they were both students at the Actors Studio in the 1960s. Shifting from acting to journalism, Bosworth eventually wrote acclaimed biographies of Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando and Diane Arbus. Beginning with an article in McCall's, she has been writing about Fonda since 1970, and she spent 10 years on this book, a probe of Fonda's psychological depths as well as her multifaceted life as actress, model, author, daughter, wife, political activist, feminist, fitness expert, and philanthropist. Career triumphs are balanced with equal time for forgotten failures, such as The Fun Couple, which "mercifully closed" on Broadway in 1962 after only three performances. Illuminating the infamous "Hanoi Jane" episode, Bosworth also offers probing details of Fonda's marriages and affairs, her insecurities, her strained relationship with her father and her fierce ambition. The remarkable reconstruction of long ago events has a fly-on-the-wall viewpoint, written with such intimacy that it sometimes generates the strange sensation of being present with Fonda and her friends. With access to Fonda's FBI files and personal papers, plus extensive interviews with her family and colleagues, Bosworth has succeeded in capturing Fonda's step-by-step transformation from wide-eyed, apolitical ingenue to the poised personality of recent decades. (Aug. 30) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
THERE'S often a moment in a biographer's life when the subject, once nonchalantly inaccessible or perhaps even hostile, decides that he must satisfy his curiosity about the project at the price of tossing scraps to this desperate soul. For Patricia Bosworth, a biographer of Montgomery Clift, this moment came in 2003, when she was invited to a weeklong respite at the 2,500-acre ranch in New Mexico that Ted Turner had bestowed on Jane Fonda as "a divorce present." Fonda, with her breast implants newly removed and her shapely legs encased in terrific blue-jeans ("I have 50 pairs," she explained), plied Bosworth, a friend from the Actors Studio in the 1960s who had profiled her for magazines over the years, with red wine in enormous goblets, showed off her man-made lake stocked with fish, and introduced her to her six horses, including a white stallion purchased from Mike Nichols, and a golden retriever, a gift from Larry David. Unsurprisingly, this idyll in high-end never-never land was not to last. Fonda soon directed Bosworth to the task at hand, turning on a Tiffany lamp in a small room overlooking the Pecos River to attend to the real reason for Bosworth's visit: 22,000 pages of documents from Fonda's F.B.I. files, mostly generated during the Nixon administration, when she became vocal about the Vietnam War. This would have been a mighty bounty had Fonda not already known that the fat stacks contained little of interest, and required Bosworth to share any new information with her. After all, Fonda was writing her own memoir, and she needed painstaking assistance with the files so that she could be sure she hadn't missed any juicy parts. "I've already written 500 pages of my book," Fonda breezily declared. "How many have you got?" When Bosworth admitted Fonda was lapping her, Fonda grinned. "What I really want to know," she said, "is, who's gonna be first?" I doubt there was any question about that. The fiendish competitive streak that has driven Fonda to become one of the most stupendously self-actualizing women in the world - stage and screen actress, activist, philanthropist and, in spite of the shiny turquoise leotard she wore in her workout-queen days, an all-around cool chick - would propel her into pole position yet again on the publishing front. Bosworth maintained what must have been a difficult sense of composure as Fonda's "My Life So Far," a revealing memoir so well made that it seems to be the work of a professional ghostwriter, hit the best-seller lists in 2005. (Fonda denies there was a ghostwriter, claiming she sometimes wrote "barefoot, with a down parka over my pajamas, hair akimbo, shivering with cold, teeth chattering, tears running down my face," which is of course the way most good writing is done.) Even now, Fonda recently cooperated with Hilton Als for a long New Yorker profile and has just released her next book, PRIME TIME (Random House, $27), which is actually a part-time memoir and part-time self-help book about women's lives in their 60s and 70s, complete with exercise, diet and sex tips, including the information that if you are having trouble masturbating, it's worth trying to read a book at the same time. In this saturated climate, it's difficult to judge Bosworth's book without considering exactly which leftovers Fonda has kept on the plate. A dedicated researcher with an excellent ear for a quote (and like me, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, though we have never met), Bosworth has a lovely way with Fonda's troubled family history, beginning with her mother, Frances, already a rich widow obsessed with money, sex and beauty when she met Henry Fonda (her first husband, a middle-aged tycoon, drowned in a sanitarium swimming pool while trying to dry out). But when Hank, a distant and rageful man who largely withheld love from his family, left Frances in 1949, it was she who ended up in a psychiatric ward. When she returned home briefly one afternoon, she called out for Jane, but Jane refused to greet her. Frances made quick work of sneaking into a bathroom, where she grabbed a small porcelain keepsake before climbing into a car with her uniformed nurses. A week later, she committed suicide by slitting her throat with a razor she had concealed in the tiny box. This is the kind of stuff biographers can't screw up, and Bosworth, who seems as mild-mannered as Fonda is fiery, remains a good guide through Fonda's quests for perfection after this act: perfection of the body, which she starved by binging and purging on roast chicken and Toll House cookies as many as 20 times a day for decades; of the mind, which she tried to hone as a political activist; and of the soul, which she nourished with a series of love affairs that were as gaudy in their infidelities as they were addictive to a woman who never knew parental love. Some of Fonda's most memorable quotations in the book, including the statement" that her family life had trapped her "in a Greek drama, like Athena, who sprang fully formed from the head of her father, Zeus," have appeared elsewhere. But original interviews with many of those who worked with Fonda on her films and political campaigns, as well as interviews with her brother, Peter, and daughter, Vanessa Vadim - whom Fonda admits she treated at arm's length before turning to full-bodied momma love - add spice to the mix. Andreas Voutsinas, a gay Greek acting coach who worked with Fonda for eight years in the 1960s, gives a scintillating interview as well, confiding at length about their complex relationship. "Oh, yes, we had sex," he tells Bosworth. "Of course she knew I was gay, but we didn't talk about it." The F.B.I, files make an appearance as well, but much of their heat - like a phony letter about Jane and a Black Panther leading a chant of "We will kill Richard Nixon," which J. Edgar Hoover authorized an underling to send to Daily Variety - has already been generated. DOES Fonda care about the version of her life presented here, as it deviates from her own - or did she only want help sifting through her F.B.I. files on those long nights in New Mexico? The Fonda whom Bosworth creates is both bolder (there is much nude parading about, and a supposed utterance during her activist years that her "biggest regret" was that she never had sex with Che Guevara), more arrogant (surrounded by yes people and "mediocrities") and less intelligent ("a stupid . . . actress," according to an interview with David Halberstam) than the one Fonda wrote about in her pajamas. It's a Fonda who seems more likely to be interested in what people may have said about her in a major biography, but she told Bosworth she didn't care. "I live in the present," she said. "I live in the moment. I don't want to live in the past." (Or, as Fonda likes to say, "I know my own truth.") Whether this is the case or not, it remains clear that Fonda, even at 73, is fully capable of continuing to create her own reality, and her own press, regardless of what biographies may come to pass. Fonda has always seemed to be on a quest for perfection - of the body, of the mind and of the soul. Vanessa Grigoriadis is a contributing editor at New York magazine, Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair.
Kirkus Review
Distinguished celebrity biographer and Vanity Fair contributing editor Bosworth (Marlon Brando, 2001, etc.) recounts the life story of an American icon in all its headyand at times, unabashedly scandalousglory.Ten years in the making, the book is based in exhaustive and meticulous research as well as a friendship the author began with Fonda in the late 1960s when they were both students studying at the Actors Studio in New York. Bosworth divides Fonda's life into five distinctive stages, naming each after the "archetype" Fonda embodied during those phases: daughter, actress, movie star/sex symbol, political activist and workout guru/tycoon wife. With consummate skill and insight, the author follows Fonda through a childhood that included tortured relationships with an emotionally unavailable father, Henry Fonda, and a troubled mother who committed suicide at age 42. As young adult, Fonda's dynamism drove her toward defining herself as an actress-artist (rather than her father's actress daughter). At the same time, a need for quasi-paternal control caused her to fall into Svengali-like relationships with menmost notably, director Roger Vadim and activist Tom Hayden. In the early '70s, Fonda's rebelliousness caused her to move toward the political left and speak out against the Vietnam War. As a way to help fund Hayden's political ambitions, Fonda began a workout studio in the '80s that evolved into a multimillion-dollar industry. No longer the sexpot, she was now an Academy Awardwinning feminist-actress who took pride in "empowering women to be in charge of their bodies." Bosworth's coverage of Fonda's apparent backslide into the Stepford-esque wife of media tycoon Ted Turner is not nearly as in-depth as that she gives to the other phases of her colorfully tumultuous history. But this does not take away from her total effort, which is as epic as the life she chronicles.Reading to savor.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
PROLOGUE Only Jane Fonda could upstage Oprah Winfrey. It happened on February 10, 2001, during a performance of Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues , which was being acted out by sixty megastars in front of a sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden. The show was a fundraiser for V-Day, the international organization that works to prevent violence toward women. I'll never forget it. All the celebrities, including Oprah, stood in a semicircle reciting their vignettes about women's sexual triumphs and tragedies from index cards--all the celebrities except Jane, who had memorized her piece and when it was her turn stepped out of the circle and gave a spellbinding rendition about what it's like to watch one's grandchild emerge bloody and screaming from his mother's womb. By turns anxious, tender, and emotional, Jane ended the monologue with " and I was there in the room. I remember ." The audience gave a loud cheer. At that point, Jane curtsied to a dark-haired young woman who was seated in the front row. It turned out the young woman was Jane's daughter, Vanessa Vadim. Months before, Jane had assisted the midwife at the birth of Vanessa's son, Malcolm. Jane was paying her homage. Afterward there was a noisy party at the cavernous Hammerstein Ballroom. Jane was surrounded by so many admirers that I had to push my way through the crowd to congratulate her. "I did it! I did it!" she exclaimed to me, eyes sparkling. She hadn't acted in thirteen years and she suffered from "such God-awful stage fright I was petrified I wouldn't be able to get through it," she confided to me, "but I did." We gripped hands. Jane and I have known each other since the 1960s. We were kids then, studying with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. I was an actress for ten years on Broadway before switching to journalism, while Jane was refashioning herself as Barbarella. I wrote my first article about Jane in 1970 for McCall's magazine. She had just been nominated for an Academy Award for her searing performance as the suicidal marathon dancer in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? She went on to win Oscars for both Klute and Coming Home , movies that defined her political evolution. For the next three decades I continued to write stories about her: when she was burned in effigy as Hanoi Jane, and a couple of years after, when the Gallup Poll listed her as one of the most admired women in the world along with Mother Teresa. Jane polarizes, and the public remains fascinated by her. She has an extraordinary ability to reinvent herself in response to the times. Consider that she transformed herself from movie star to political activist to exercise guru to tycoon wife and now, in the twenty-first century, she's turning into an exemplary philanthropist. She doesn't generate, she reacts--to people, places, and events; everything about the fast-paced, chaotic reality that is American life turns her on. But then I realize that above all she is a consummate actress who has an uncanny ability to inhabit various characters at will. She once told me, "The weird thing about acting is that you get paid for discovering you have multiple personalities." Jane can will herself into becoming whatever she wants to become. Which is why I wanted to write this book about her. In 2000 I began researching. Jane had given the project her blessing, so I interviewed scores of her friends and colleagues. But Jane herself refused to speak to me. She said it was because she was writing her own memoir and didn't want to give anything away. Then in January 2003, she suddenly changed her mind and invited me to come to her ranch in New Mexico for a week. "I'm going over my FBI files and you can help me. I don't feel like doing it alone," she said. I agreed, and I wasn't surprised; Jane constantly changes her mind. That's the way she is--full of contradictions. I wasn't surprised either to receive the following e-mail from her a couple of days later: Sat 18 Jan 2003 Subject: Gulp From: Jane Fonda To: Patricia Bosworth Deep breath. Big gulp. Here's why: I have my own special personal stories about my life and I do have a big fear that I will give them away to you, because I do tend to let things just spill. YET, I do trust you and would like to spend time with you so here goes: I do have all my FBI files like I said and you are welcome to go through them provided you share what's interesting (most isn't) with me. This is a good way to avoid having to do it myself in exchange for you're [sic] being there. How's that? If it's just us, it's truly just us. I am not a cook and eat sparingly when left to my own devices. . . . Aside from that, when not writing I am engaged in heavy manual labor such as cutting down trees and clearing trail. You would be welcome to come along but not required to participate. XXOO jane Two months later I arrived at Jane's 2,500-acre ranch outside Santa Fe. After she showed me around her comfortable, spacious home, we sat down in her vaulted living room, in front of a crackling fire, and drank red wine from oversize goblets. She told me how glad she was that I was writing her biography. There had already been nine published biographies of her, all written by men--all of whom, she believed, felt threatened by her. "I'm glad a woman is writing about me," she said. I began explaining why I wanted to write this book. Jane has fulfilled every female fantasy, achieving love, fame, money, and success on a grand scale. She's a genuine American icon who won't be remembered for her movies but rather for her outsize serial lives. Jane interrupted. "I've already written five hundred pages of my book. How many have you got?" "Not that many," I admitted. With that, she grinned. "What I really want to know is, who's gonna be first?" She is the daughter of Henry Fonda. His portrayal of Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath is embedded in the American consciousness. Jane has always willed herself to be the best at everything. She is also heir to a terrible childhood tragedy: her mother, Frances Fonda, slit her throat when Jane was twelve. Her suicide is the crucial event in Jane's life and it haunts her to this day. After the suicide Henry Fonda, always the perfectionist, became even more remote, escaping into his work and three more marriages; each wife seemed younger than the last. Jane kept on battling for his love. She triumphed on Broadway and then went on to make forty-one movies, creating characters as disparate as the naive cowgirl in Cat Ballou and the giddy newlywed Corie in Barefoot in the Park to the tough-talking call girl Bree Daniels in Klute , for which she won her first Oscar. In her twenties she began to reinvent herself to attract and please a succession of father substitutes. She shifted seamlessly from playing film director Roger Vadim's Parisian sex kitten, to political activist and exercise guru when she was married to radical Tom Hayden. Finally, she became the trophy wife of maverick billionaire Ted Turner, a man as famous as she is. My 2003 visit to her ranch coincided with a turning point. Although she still considers herself primarily a social activist, Jane had decided to recycle herself as a movie star after thirteen years away from the screen. At sixty-five, "It won't be easy," she joked. She'd hired a new agent; she had braces on her teeth; and she was trying out color contacts for her eyes. She'd also just had her breast implants removed. "My kids are so relieved. They tell me I look normal again," she said. She'd already turned down the remake of The Manchurian Candidate because she didn't want her Hollywood comeback to be as a villainess. She told me that Cameron Crowe, who wrote Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Jerry Maguire , was writing a new movie for her. She said she would be playing Leonardo DiCaprio's tap-dancing mother in the film. She did not say she was now often obliged to audition for parts, including another role for which she was in competition with Anne Bancroft. I found it hard to believe these two Oscar-winning actresses had to compete against each other, but in the end the face-off was merciful: neither got the part. Ultimately, the Cameron Crowe project didn't work out either. How can I accurately describe our conversations in the five days that followed? Jane is a prodigious talker. I taped and took notes, and everything she said ended up, in one way or another, in this book. She talked and talked and talked on a vast range of subjects: The importance of Michael Moore's documentary on the Columbine massacre; Jimmy Carter; the United Nations; her travels to New Delhi, Mumbai, and Jerusalem. Marilyn Monroe. The joys of being a grandmother. Her first husband, Roger Vadim, and his sexual vulnerability; her dreams; her brother, Peter's, courage; her son, Troy, and his dynamite performance in Soldier's Girl where he played a GI in love with a transsexual. She also talked about Sue Sally Jones, her beloved tomboy friend from grade school, with whom she'd recently reunited. Simone Signoret. The glories of a good martini and the ecstasies of pot. She talked about Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice , the book that has meant more to her than any other book. She talked about her daughter, Vanessa's, talent as a filmmaker. She talked about her obsession with trees--big old trees, with thick, twisted roots. She talked about moving full-grown trees from one of Ted's ranches in New Mexico to her ranch, oak, fir, maple, and poplar. "I am too old to plant young trees." She talked about when she had planted trees at her farm outside Paris and the way Henry Fonda had planted trees years ago at their family home called Tigertail. While I was listening to her, I decided Jane looked exactly the way she did when I first met her at the Actors Studio, over thirty-five years ago. The same long, sad face, an exact replica of her father's. The same clear-eyed gaze and elegant remoteness. She was warmer than I expected, and sometimes quite funny, but she was so tightly wound I wondered if she could ever really relax. She was impeccably groomed. When I commented on the cut of her tight blue jeans, she said. "Oh, I have fifty pairs." I expressed surprise. "Well, Ted has twenty-seven ranches. I used to keep clothes at every ranch so I would never have to pack." Every so often the phone rang. Once it was Kofi Annan, the secretary-general of the United Nations. Then it was Ted Turner. Jane spoke to him soothingly, as one might to a child. "You're a good man, Ted. Don't rush into anything too quickly." They talked for quite a while. When she hung up she explained what had just transpired. She spoke in staccato sound bites--a habit she had honed over years of interviews. "Ted is trying to break up with his old mistress Frederique. They just aren't getting along. He's met some new girl, Rebecca something. Ted and I are close. Sometimes we even travel together. He'll probably come to the ranch again. He gave me this ranch as a divorce present. I like to see him. I like to see him go. I feel sorry for him. He can't be alone. Sometimes I take him into my lap and rock him like a baby." "Aside from the womanizing, what broke you up?" I asked. "Ted needs constant companionship. Keeping up with him was absolutely exhausting. His nervous energy almost crackles in the air. He can't sit still, because if he does, the demons will catch up with him." Suddenly she confided she was happier than she'd ever been in her life. "I'm free!" And then she added, "I love living alone for once." She was about to move into her new home in Atlanta, four lofts renovated into a single gigantic apartment in Buckhead, one of the city's wealthiest enclaves. As she spoke, I was conscious that all around us were photographs of Henry Fonda, reminders that he remained the central presence in her life. She did not deny it. "My dad shadows me," she said. "I dream about him. Think about him. Wonder if he'd approve of what I'm doing now." She will eventually write in her memoir, My Life So Far , "All my life I have been my father's daughter. Trapped in a Greek drama like Athena who sprang from the head of her father Zeus. Discipline and drive started in my childhood. I learned love through perfection." But she is also her mother's child. Obsessed with her looks. Obsessed with money. Obsessed with sex. Excerpted from Jane Fonda: The Private Life of a Public Woman by Patricia Bosworth All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Prologue | p. 1 |
1 Daughter: 1937-1958 | p. 15 |
II Actress: 1958-1963 | p. 105 |
III Movie Star/Sex Symbol: 1963-1970 | p. 187 |
IV Political Activist: 1970-1988 | p. 307 |
V Workout Guru/Tycoon Wife: 1988-2000 | p. 439 |
Epilogue | p. 528 |
Acknowledgments | p. 35 |
Notes | p. 538 |
Bibliography | p. 564 |
Photo Credits | p. 567 |
Index | p. 569 |