JANE FONDA MAKES PEACE With Her Past
AS SHE PREPARES TO TURN 80, THE OSCAR WINNER OPENS UP ABOUT LIFE, LOVE & WHAT SHE’S LEARNED
Jane Fonda still chokes up talking about when her father Henry won his only Oscar, the 1982 Best Actor award for On Golden Pond, a movie she starred in and produced for him. Her voice wavering, she recalls, “My father was very, very ill and he could not attend the ceremonies, and he said, would I receive the Oscar on his behalf? And when they called his name…” she stops to take a breath, “it was probably the happiest moment of my life.”
It’s especially poignant since Jane fought to make that moment happen. As her co-star Dabney Coleman tells Closer, Jane wrote him a note saying, “This is a little movie I’m doing with my dad. I want to see if I can get him an Academy Award.” Recalling that moment still stirs emotions for Jane about her childhood, her parents and her longing to be loved that she’s grappled with for a lifetime. She freely admits that she does have remorse — about her ill-advised actions while protesting the Vietnam War, her need to please others, and especially, “that I wasn’t a better parent,” she says. But she has worked hard to put her mistakes behind her. “You have to stay brave and keep trying to go beyond your comfort zone to become who you’re supposed to be,” she says. Now, at 79, with a hit Netflix sitcom, Grace and Frankie, a still-vital activist life, and a renewed dedication to family, she’s finally made peace with her past and learned to embrace her true self.
“I made this pledge to myself that I was not going to have any
regrets.”
— Jane
DIFFICULT BEGINNINGS
Jane had a privileged but emotionally challenging childhood. Growing up in Greenwich, Conn., her movie-star father Henry was distant, frequently away working and often angry. Her mother, Frances, suffered from bipolar disorder
and spent time in and out of hospitals. “Mother would be there and then she wouldn’t,” Jane wrote in her 2005 memoir, My Life So Far. “I didn’t really know her that well.”
Frances committed suicide when Jane was 12. In later years, when trying to understand why her mother took her own life by slashing her throat with a razor, Jane revealed she discovered her mother had been abused as a child by a man who tuned the family piano. “The moment I learned about my mother I understood…why she was the way she was,” Jane said. “[I] forgave her.”
Her father didn’t provide much comfort, although she insists she was “mad for him.” A study in contradictions, Henry was an artist who “could spend hours stitching a needlepoint pattern,” Jane wrote, but also, “In the confines of our home, Dad’s darker side would emerge.” At times, he “would sit for hours in our presence and never speak.”
Jane desperately wanted his love. Leaving her tomboy youth behind after her mother’s death, she strove to be “perfect” so a man, especially her dad, would love her. “When I hit adolescence, all that mattered was how I looked and fit in,” Jane admits. “My father would send my stepmother to tell me to lose weight and wear longer skirts.” In response, Jane developed bulimia, which she didn’t conquer until she was 35.
Still, Jane credits her father as a somewhat positive influence. She found her way into acting, and she adds, “My father was the reason I became an activist. As I was growing up, he was making films like 12 Angry Men and The Grapes of Wrath, playing characters who spoke up for justice. I knew he loved these characters, and I wanted him to love me.”
Her determination paid off. Sam Waterston, who co-stars with Jane in Grace and Frankie, tells Closer, “She must have been born with [resilience], or she must’ve inherited it from her parents. It doesn’t matter what knocks you down, as long as you get back up!”
MARRIAGE & MEANING
It took years for Jane to gain that confidence. It was while living with her first husband, director Roger Vadim, whom she married in 1965, that Jane read about an attack on a Vietnamese village. “It’s like everything went flip,” she says. “The world changed.” She became an anti-war activist, and began to speak up for other causes as well: welfare rights, Native American rights. “Activism changed me forever,” Jane explained.
She began attending rallies and marches, but her marriage to Roger, an alcoholic, fell apart. They divorced in 1973 and Jane married activist and future politician Tom Hayden three days later. After their first date she says she told a friend, “I just met the man I was going to spend the rest of my life with.”
Not long after Jane began dating Tom, she decided to go to Hanoi, Vietnam. And she admits now it was there she made one of her biggest mistakes when she allowed herself to be photographed sitting on a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun. From that moment, when she appeared to be laughing with the enemy, she was dubbed “Hanoi Jane” and became vilified as a traitor. “That was the biggest lapse of judgment in my life,” she wrote. “I don’t regret going to North Vietnam. I’m glad I went.” But she added, “That two-minute lapse of sanity will haunt me until I die.”
After Vietnam, Jane’s acting career soared — she won her second Oscar for 1978’s Coming Home. But
her marriage to Tom, with whom she had a son, Troy Garity, began to fail. “I wanted the marriage to work,” she wrote, but her insecurities rose again. “Tom’s emotional coldness reflected my father’s.”
It especially upset her that Tom saw her workout videos “as an exercise in vanity,” she says. Nevertheless it became a multimillion-dollar success story (she released her last video in 2012 at age 75). Her popularity affected the marriage, though, and she and Tom divorced in 1990.
But Jane soldiered on. Since her mid-40s, she has worked hard to banish regrets. “I’ve known Jane for 35 years. She so believes what she carries on about,” Grace and Frankie’s Lily Tomlin tells Closer. “I can remember when we were going to do 9 to 5, she would say, ‘We just have to take a leap of faith!’ ”
Jane took another leap into marriage in 1991, with media mogul Ted Turner. Despite their differences, “I wanted to hang in and try to make it better for this lovable, fascinating man-child, who was just enough not like my father,” she said. After their 2001 divorce, she focused on improving her relationship with her kids. “She didn’t do anything with me, so not a lot of great memories,” Vanessa Vadim, now 48, tells Closer. “I admit that I wasn’t a good parent, especially to my daughter,” Jane has said. “I never really showed up. I did what my parents did to me.”
TURNING POINT
In recent years, Jane has shown up for big moments in Vanessa’s life and has been an engaged grandmother to her kids, Malcolm, 18, and Viva, 14. “Things are easier between us now,” Jane said. With Troy, 44, she’s done the same, supporting his acting career and helping him pick out an engagement ring for his bride, Simone Bent. “I studied how to be a parent,” Jane admits. “I am trying to make up for what I didn’t know. When I die I want my family around me. I want them to love me, and I have to earn that.”
Celibate for seven years, Jane says she found true intimacy for the first time with music executive Richard Perry, 75, in 2009. “When I was young I had so many inhibitions — I didn’t know what I desired,” she says. Though they broke up earlier this year, “we continue to maintain a close friendship and care deeply about each other,” Richard says.
After years of searching and trying to be perfect, she is finally happy with who she is. “When people say, ‘When were you your happiest?’, I would have to say now,” Jane shares. Of her daily routine, she notes, “I get more than eight hours sleep every night; I meditate twice a day; I eat right; I work out.”
She’s also proud of her family and her career, especially her hit sitcom, which is giving “a face to aging women,” she’s proud to say. “Jane is just a fighter,” Grace and Frankie’s Brooklyn Decker, who plays Jane’s daughter, tells Closer. “She seems totally unfazed by anything that comes at her.”
Jane will turn 80 in December, and while the road has been long, her complicated journey has been its own reward. “For me personally, any power I have is as a woman who is authentic and owns her own skin,” Jane has said. “It’s taken me a very long time to get here.”
“I wish I’d known that it’s OK to say no. And that ‘No’ is a complete sentence.”
— Jane