In 1978, Cosmo chatted with Jane Fonda about political activism, acting, her family, her marriage, and more.
When Cosmo caught up with Jane Fonda in June, 1978, she’d just turned 40, a perilous age for an actress in that era of Hollywood. Yet Fonda was hitting her stride. She’d already come a long way from the sex-kitten roles of her twenties, and had evolved beyond the strident political activism of her thirties. She’d transformed into gifted actress in classics such as They Shoot Horses Don’t They? and Klute, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1971.
Despite her onscreen success, Fonda’s activism—including a sympathetic visit to North Vietnam, an optic nightmare—hurt her film career and it wasn’t until the end of the decade that she rebounded, first with an Oscar-nominated turn as writer Lillian Hellman in 1977 drama, Julia, then as a marine’s wife in Hal Ashby’s 1978 emo-Vietnam saga, Coming Home, for which she would win her second Academy Award for Best Actress. It was around this time Cosmo sat down with her to talk about her power marriage to political organizer, Tom Hayden, her family, and of course acting. “Being forty doesn’t bother me,” Jane told Cosmo. “I think it’s because I’m very happy. I’ve discovered that you really can get wise and avoid the mistakes of your youth.”
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Just yesterday, it seems, if you wanted to see Jane Fonda, you merely switched on the nightly news. There she was on some college campus, with her denims and frizzy hair, appealing to conscience on the evils of Vietnam or praising the virtues of the Black Panthers. Many viewers were enraged to see Henry Fonda’s movie-star daughter, who also happened to be the chic and voluptuous wife of French director Roger Vadim, shaking her head sadly amid war-ravished Hanoi while North Vietnamese officials showed her the damage done by American bombs. She was denounced in Congress as a traitor, while New York construction workers burned her in effigy from the steel girders of a Manhattan high-rise, and a group of Maryland legislators half-seriously threatened to cut out her tongue.
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But frenzied periods in history often produce unpredictable, ironical aftermaths, so that yesterday’s certainties are the grist for today’s surprise twists of fate. For example, like many of her friends and enemies, Jane surmised that her passionate antiwar activities had probably wrecked her acting career. “I just said to myself, if that’s the way it’s going to be—so be it. I’ll find other ways to divert my creative energies.” And she adds: “I’m a survivor.”
Indeed she is. At the moment, she is sopping up glowing reviews and prestigious awards like a lapsed vegetarian plunging into beef stew. The movie industry, which nervously sidestepped her during the heat of Vietnam, perhaps intimidated by threats of boycotts against her films by angry veterans’ groups, now courts her avidly as it does Barbra Streisand, Diane Keaton, and a few other actresses whose presence in a film is regarded as sound box office insurance. Not everyone in Hollywood likes or trusts someone who strayed so far from its fold, but Jane, somewhat like Marlon Brando, is viewed with a mixture of awe, fear, and respect as an uncompromising individual who openly rejects Hollywood’s values but nevertheless keeps on working. Jimmy Stewart’s goddaughter is now being favorably compared in her acting style, range, and intelligence to that illustrious critic’s darling, Liv Ullmann. Comeback seems a paltry work to describe all that Jane Fonda has accomplished in the past few years.
“Being forty doesn’t bother me,” says Jane. “I think it’s because I’m very happy. I’ve discovered that you really can get wise and avoid the mistakes of your youth.” Yesterday’s dyed-blond sex kitten with her leather boots and padded bras, who titillated moviegoers in Cat Ballou and Barbarella, has evolved into a bright, lovely, self-assured woman who wears no makeup and looks at least five years younger than her age. The real-life Jane is far more wary, vulnerable, and private than her steely-spined Joan of Arc image. She’s been badly burned and the scars are slow to heal. “It’s been rough at times,” she says softly. “I was a leper to a lot of people in this town. It made me very sad. Some of them I’ve known since I was a little girl.” For several years after receiving the 1971 Academy Award for her performance as the victimized prostitute in Klute, Jane was largely neglected by the movie studios.
Then, Klute was redistributed in 1973 and made a considerable profit, indicating public acceptance of Fonda. She did a couple of forgettable films that year—Steelyard Blues and A Doll’s House—and then a breakthrough occurred in 1975, when Columbia Pictures agreed to hire her for a mildly amusing comedy with George Segal called Fun With Dick and Jane. Says Jane: “I just wanted to be funny and look pretty.” The strategy worked perfectly.
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“I’ll never forget sitting in the balcony of a small movie house in Encino, when they were sneak-previewing Dick and Jane,” says Fonda’s close friend and former agent, Paula Weinsten. “I was petrified when the picture started, not knowing what to expect from the audience when Jane appeared on screen. Then, a few people behind me began whispering, ‘I love her hair, don’t you?’ ‘Look, she still has a great figure.’ And I just burst into tears. I knew that Jane had made it, that she would be able to resume her career.”
That film may have deceived some Fonda critics into thinking radical antiestablishment Jane was meekly returning to the fold to make the harmless films of her youth. But her stunning Academy Award-nomination portrayal of another arch-rebel, writer Lillian Hellman, in the acclaimed film Julia suggests higher ambitions, as does her performance as a marines captain’s wife in Coming Home, for which she’s likely to be nominated next year as Best Actress.
Meanwhile, Alan Pakula, who directed her in Klute, claims to have a superb Fonda tour-de-force performance in the editing stages of a modern Western he made late last year, called Comes a Horseman Wild and Free. “I enjoy doing parts that stretch me, characters that are as different from parts that stretch me, characters that are as different from me and one another as possible. I just won’t do a movie that I don’t believe in,” she says.
Hal Ashby, who directed her in Coming Home, was astonished to see Jane practicing the lasso during breaks on the set of his film. She was merely tuning up for her next job—Pakula’s Western—which she finished in December. By mid-January, she was back at work, her brown hair dyed red to play a television news reporter in a film called Power. To additional film commitments, including Neil Simon’s California Suite, will keep her working into next year. “Why? Am I working so hard?” she says, repeating my question. “Because I want to prove to the public that I can flourish in spite of all the controversy. I’m anxious to dispel the notion that someone who is outspoken and forthright won’t be able to work. This isn’t the ’50s, when actors were blackballed because their politics were left-wing…I want to keep going to avoid any chance of a subliminal message getting out that ‘they did her in.’ People root for a survivor who stuck her neck out. I think many average people believe they’re being screwed by the system and don’t know what to do about it… maybe I represent to them someone who fights back and still survives.”
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Who but Jane Fonda would use her newly acquired demand as an actress to make a political statement? Which is why she is believed when she declares that her five-year marriage to political activist Tom Hayden will last until death do part. Their marriage is marinated in politics. A rough-skinned, bulbous-nosed tough, and brilliant Irishman, Hayden looks like a South Side street brawler, although his level of political sophistication was sufficient to convince President Carter, during a half-hour White House meeting last January, that Hayden was someone who should be asked to return for a longer visit. “Tom has brilliant political instincts,” says his wife. Outside of Jane’s movie career, in which Tom shows a remote but respectful interest, their life together is a passionately shared political as well as personal commitment. Or, as Jane puts it, “I can’t separate my politics from my marriage or my life style. These aren’t separate categories for me.”
Hayden was raised in extreme poverty and is openly antagonistic to privilege or conspicuous displays of wealth. By contrast, Jane’s mother, wealthy New York socialite Frances Seymour Brokaw, was proud to have been a descendant of the family of Lady Jane Seymour, third wife of Henry VIII, and nicknamed her daughter “Lady Jane,” which tomboy Jane detested but was unable to until adolescence. By then, her mother (Henry Fonda’s second wife) had become mentally unstable and committed suicide. Whatever happened to Lady Jane? She scarcely resembles Mrs. Tom Hayden, who does her own wash, cooks her own meals, makes her own beds, and ferries her four-year-old son, Troy, and ten-year-old daughter, Vanessa (by Vadim), in the family’s 1971 Volvo. She pumps her own gas at the cheaper self-service island at the corner filling station and runs her own shopping cart up and down the aisles of the local supermarket. Her family home today is far different from the kind in which she grew up in Brentwood, L.A, and Greenwich, Connecticut. She lives with Tom on a quiet beachfront street near Santa Monica, in a modest house, even by middle-class standards, with three small bedrooms, a tiny, plant-crowded kitchen, and a living room designed for those who expect few visitors. Like Tom, she’s a voracious reader and books are stacked everywhere.
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“Frankly,” says Jane, as we sit in her living room drinking tea, “I resent stories that describe us as living in some shanty. We have a nice house, and live no better or worse than most people. We live simply, and while it’s true that, unlike our neighbors, we can afford more luxuries, I was never comfortable with being a little rich girl. Little by little, I’ve begun to realize I don’t need a secretary or anyone else working for me. In my family, we do things for ourselves, and have little overhead. You see, if I were living expensively, I might feel pressure to do films that grated against what I believed in. Instead, I’d rather put the money away, which means if I don’t want to work for a few years until that right role comes along, that’s fine.”
Jane believes in fasting before starting an important new project like a film. For who are three days before, she exists on nothing but fruit juices, especially her favorite, papaya juice. “I began doing this during the antiwar years,” she explains. “I find it exhilarating. Fasting clears my mind and flushes the poisons from my system. It’s also a good way to keep trim.”
She admits that the hectic pace of the Fonda-Hayden lives is particularly disconcerting when it involves the children. “No question, that is a problem,” she says. “Tom is wonderful about taking over totally when I’m gone. I was gone for five months making Julia, and he was in complete charge—the kids, the cooking, everything. Before that, when he was working against a deadline on his book, I took over completely.”
Vanessa attends public school, while preschooler Troy is enrolled in a neighborhood cooperative nursery, at which both Jane and Tom share the responsibility of taking charge of the kids with the other parents. “We have good, stable healthy kids,” says Jane. “Tom calls Vanessa a lapsed Brownie, because she can be a little mischief-maker. Troy is every inch his dad’s son … they adore each other.” Completing the family picture is a particularly unferocious German shepherd, Geronimo who Tom says kiddingly, has learned to bark only at passing Cadillacs and Mercedes.
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Clearly, Jane finds her life agreeable. People who meet her often remark that Jane is more attractive in person than on the screen—perhaps because of her self-assured radiance and purposeful stride. Her striking resemblance to her father when he was a young man remains undiminished with the years. Hers is a strong face: clear, expressive blue eyes, large white teeth, a thick-boned jaw, and a broad mouth. The features are not those of the classic female beauty, but they convey a fascinating mix of delicate sensibilities and assertive toughness. Tall (five feet eight inches) and trim (115 pounds), she maintains the long-legged shapeliness of a woman half her age, including what some Hollywood male connoisseurs insist is the loveliest derrière extant. (Like her father, she’s a lifelong believer in health foods, eats sparingly and only organically grown foods.) Although her manners are impeccable, she has a crisp, professional edge not unlike, say, a senior supervisor who greets complaining customers with “Yes, sir, what seems to be the problem?” Her Vassar and finishing-school days did, after all, leave their imprint.
You can chart Jane’s course, say friends, by the men in her life. In her early twenties, when she studied Method acting with Lee Strasberg in New York, did some fashion modeling, and made her first movie, Tall Story, she became involved with a Strasberg assistant named Andreas Voutsinas, who wore a black beret, smoked using a long cigarette holder, called everyone darling, and took charge of Jane’s life and career. Voutsinas was a sensuous New York intellectual with distinct preferences for sex-drenched theatrical productions. In the early ’60s, Jane became involved with another strong personality and supreme sensualist, French director Roger Vadim, whose romances with his leading ladies, especially Brigitte Bardot, created international headlines. Vadim nicknamed Jane “Kiki,” and undressed her in a succession of naughty films. “When I met Jane,” Vadim recalls, “the only clear idea she had about who she was, was that Henry Fonda was her father. She was too insecure to believe she had a personality of her own. As an actress, she didn’t believe she would ever be a star, and her tendency was to hide behind the characters she created. I was criticized for putting her in films like Barbarella, but I was trying to help her to fly and find her identity. Now, my God, the change in her is amazing … she knows exactly who she is and obviously likes the person she’s become. I see this change reflected in her work: There’s more of the real Jane on screen now than before. She’s injected her characters with important pieces of herself. She’s become a fantastic actress.”
Jane and Vadim lived in a 134-year-old farmhouse in a small village about thirty-five miles from Paris with seven dogs, eight cats, rabbits, ponies, and chickens. “Her energy was extraordinary,” says Vadim. “She was a dynamo—cleaning, cooking, tending the garden, the children, the dogs, the chickens, organizing (though not paying) the bills. There was no other wife in France like her. My mistake was not to put a stop to all this efficiency … I learned too late that she really didn’t want this life, that all that energy was frustration exploding.”
Vadim now lives in Malibu, only ten miles or so from Jane and Tom. He maintains close contact with Jane through their daughter, Vanessa. “I always thought she’d work again,” says Vadim. “People respect courage. And you can see so much of that courage on the screen. She lets you peek inside herself to reveal her contradictions—a strong, intense, nervous, vulnerable, and tender woman.” Hal Ashby, her director in Coming Home, agrees with Vadim. “What comes across with Janes is that she’s a very warm, deep-feeling human being,” he says. “These are qualities that can’t be faked in front of the camera.”
Jane agrees that her acting is more convincing than ever before, in part because she now does only roles that interest her, but also because “politics gives me a framework within which to sense what’s right and wrong, what’s off-base and what’s valuable. What I think our movies miss is situating characters against a broader social background. When you’re working with a director and decision has to be made about what happens or doesn’t happen, I can interject a viewpoint that is maybe less narrow. I’m not saying my choices are always right, but they may be less predictable. Like the scenes with the psychiatrist in Klute. I played Bree Daniel, an intelligent woman who is a high-priced call girl. The scenes with the shrink were all improvised, and I couldn’t have been so bold without my politics.
“There’s also a scene at the end when the guy was going to kill me and he was playing the tape recording of my friend whom he’s killed. The script just called for me to be frightened, but my feminist perspective made me realize my first reaction would be to cry over the girl who was dead. I think grief was a wonderful choice and made the scene memorable. And I’m sure that if I didn’t care about politics, I wouldn’t have been interested in playing Sally Hyde in Coming Home. I wouldn’t have seen the wonderful range of emotional possibilities in that woman. As it was, I brought a lot of feelings to that character that I had gone through myself. This is a film that deals with strength and survival.”
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In the film, Fonda plays the wife of a marine captain who falls in love with a paraplegic Vietnam veteran, Jon Voight—her close friend in real life. Voight marvels at the changes in Jane over the years. “She did a remarkable thing with her life by making a completely unexpected reversal at age thirty-two. I don’t mean just her antiwar activities, but an across-the-board change in all her values.
“She’s a ferocious fighter for the things she believes in and doesn’t let anybody screw her up. She says what she thinks and lets the chips fall. If you’re intimidated by strong personalities, Jane will scare you. Although she doesn’t mean to step on toes, she cares strongly and has opinions to match. I mean, you see a lot of the real Jane on screen—her strength comes out in her work—but she’s also shy, confused, vain, and very human. There’s a nice spirit in her—she’s always excited about living life.”
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Without question, the most difficult scene for Jane and Jon was filming one of the steamiest love scenes in recent memory. “We knew the scene was very necessary to the film, so it came down to doing it as honestly as we could and making it as lovely as we could. Jane didn’t want to be nude through two days of shooting, so it was decided to use a dude double. Still, there’s a brief scene with Jane and me that’s very explicit. Well, Jane was nervous about it, and when the time came to do the scene she got herself smashed—I mean, smashed—and got through it in a real fog.” Director Hal Ashby remembers Jane saying about the scene: “I knew we need it, but damn it, I can hear all my old enemies saying, ‘Well, there’s Jane Fonda naked in the sack, and that’s the kind of person she really is.’ ”
Jane admits the scene wasn’t easy. “It’s disconcerting to watch yourself later doing something so intensely private. It wasn’t easy for me, and certainly wasn’t easy for Tom.” Hal Ashby remembers facial expressions when he screened the film for the first time for cast and family members. “The two most stony-faced people in the screening room were Tom Hayden and Jon Voight’s girlfriend. Jane never said anything about Tom’s reaction, but Jon told me that the scene had given him a few rough moments with his girlfriend.”
All who know Fonda speak in awe of her enormous energy. “She’s the most organized, busiest person I’ve ever known,” says Hal Ashby. Janes is usually up at dawn to put in some quiet time before the kids wake up, reading or writing letters. She’s deeply involved with her husband in their political organization—Committee for Economic Democracy—and spends countless hours fundraising and writing letters for the group. Every free moment on the movie set will find her either on the phone or typing letters in her small dressing-room trailer. Although she was instrumental in financing Hayden’s unsuccessful bid for the Senate a few years back, she hasn’t directly invested money in the new political organization. Instead, she used her star stature to obtain a large bank loan for the purchase of 120 acres of property near Santa Barbara, which she and Tom are using for a summer camp for underprivileged children. The local is breath-taking—high atop a mountain, with fir trees, mountain streams, and flowering fields. There’s a small rustic cabin that the family uses frequently on the weekends.
“It’s our favorite place to get away from it all,” says Jane. “There’s a nearby stream where Tom loves to fish for trout. The kids loves the horses.” The place has more personal connotations as well: It represents the couple’s ideal site for what they hope will be a growing movement involving solar energy, low-cost housing, and more public involvement in corporate policies.
Although Jane acknowledges that the Fondas are not a close family (her brother, Peter lives in Montana these days), Jane and her father have finally reached a high level of warm feeling after years of bumps and bruises, highlighted by Henry Fonda once declaring during Vietnam: “Daughter? Do I have a daughter?” When Coming Home opened, Henry Fonda went on the “Today” Show to declare that his daughter was the best actress alive in the world. And earlier this year, a beaming Jane was a tearfully proud participant as the American Film Institute honored her father with its prestigious Life Achievement Award. “I’d love to make a picture with my dad,” says Jane. “I hope we can find a way to do it.” Like her father, she’s obviously in love with acting. Although she’s still ambivalent about Hollywood, the creative process of moviemaking has inspired her to form her own small production company to create her own projects. It’s called IPC—a memento from the protest years, IPC signifying Indo China Peace Campaign. “Movies, like any art form, must have a clear vision,” she says. “Basically, movies are some sort of group art—you work with others to create a vision of what you want to do.”
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The difference between the prewar Jane Fonda and the current superstar is that she feels more “centered” in her life, more sure of her values. There were low and bitter moments during the war years when she was being rejected both by her political critics and by those within the peace movement who distrusted her fame and wealth. A chance meeting with Tom Hayden in Chicago rescued her from despair. “I’m lucky,” she says, “really lucky. Tom is a person who really cares about people.” Because of his caring for her, Tom Hayden, of all people, may well be credited with providing the film industry with its most exceptional actress. Without Hayden in her life, it’s doubtful Jane would be the happy person or superb actress that she is today. She has become a significant creative force in film.
Not long ago, at Hollywood’s Gower Street studios, she emerged from the closed set of her latest film, Power, looking lovely in high-heeled boots and snug-fitting beige slacks, hair streaming out from under a hard-hat. Jane Fonda in a hard-hat! Yes, as the role demands, she’s a news reporter visiting a nuclear power plant where hard-hats are mandatory. Workmen scurried around her in the narrow, cluttered studio alley and one of them paused and handed her a large, shiny apple, which Jane took with a smile. At that moment, a telephone repair truck ambled slowly up the alley and abruptly braked to a halt in front of Jane. The driver leaned out of the cab window and tapped his own hard-hat. Then he called out: “Hey, Janie, you finally joining us, or what?” Jane looked startled for a moment, then understood and grinned. “No,” she replied with a smile, “this is only for the movies.” The driver laughed and as the truck drove off, he tipped his hard-hat and shouted, “Well, give ’em hell, Janie. Give ’em hell, anyway.”
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