JANE FONDA AT 80 ‘Men, movies
and my incredible life’
For eight decades, Jane Fonda – at times controversial, often inspiring and never less than fascinating – has commanded our attention. The outspoken daughter of movie legend Henry Fonda, who became a star herself in her early 20s, has seen every moment of her life – both tragic and triumphant – play out in the public eye. And what a journey it’s been: she has won two Oscars, married and divorced three times, launched a workout empire, been celebrated and condemned for protesting the Vietnam War, battled an eating disorder and struggled with her mother’s suicide. At 80, Fonda is eloquently candid about her own past and present. “Fact is, I’ve had a really interesting life,” says the mother of three, who looks back in Susan Lacy’s riveting HBO documentary Jane Fonda in Five Acts (premiering Sept. 24). “I told them, ‘I don’t want you to do a documentary about a movie star because I’m more than that.’”
Now, the iconic actress opens up to WHO about her life, loves, what she’s learned … and what she’s still learning. “There’s more that I have to achieve,” she says. “Not in terms of career, but just growth as a human being.”
She was a late bloomer when it came to finding herself.
“Up until my 60s, I was to an extent defined by the men in my life,” says Fonda, referring to her actor father Henry, and three husbands, Roger Vadim, Tom Hayden and Ted Turner. “I was brought up to please, and I wanted my father to love me, so I would turn myself into a pretzel to be what he wanted me to be – not necessarily what I already was.”
She did the same in her marriages, transforming her identity to fit with her partners. Finally, on her own, she says in the documentary, “I became who I was supposed to be all along.”
She had a traumatic childhood, but forgave her parents.
When Fonda was 12, her mother, socialite Frances Ford Seymour, slit her throat in a mental institution at 42. “When I wrote my memoir [2006’s My Life
So Far], I dedicated it to my mother,” Fonda says. “I knew if I did, I would be forced to really try to figure her out. I never really knew her.” Fonda pored over her mother’s medical records and learned that she was bipolar. “My mother was a very complicated woman, a very, very beautiful woman, but she always seemed sick,” Fonda says. The young Jane idolised her father, though he was often emotionally distant. He put her on a train to boarding school a year after her mother’s death; Fonda learned it was a suicide from a movie magazine. She reconciled with her father when they made 1981’s On
Golden Pond. Later, learning about her mum’s mental illness helped her find closure. “If you can come to answers, as I was able to do, you end up being able to say, ‘This had nothing to do with me.’ It wasn’t that I wasn’t lovable … the minute you know that, you can feel tremendous empathy and you can forgive.”
After three marriages, she says she is no longer dating.
“I’ve closed up shop,” Fonda insists when asked about the state of her love life. “Men don’t ask me out.” But she easily summons up
“My mother was a very beautiful woman, but she always seemed sick”
her past passions. Her first husband, French screenwriter and director Roger Vadim, directed her in 1968’s Barbarella. “Everyone fell in love with Roger Vadim,” Fonda says. “Men and women. He was incredibly sexy … I was young and wanted him to teach me how to be a woman.” But their marriage was tainted by Vadim’s womanising and insatiable sexual appetite. (In her memoir, Fonda wrote that he liked bringing other women into their bed.) In the documentary, she says she left him because “I knew I was going to have to leave [ him] and that whole hedonistic relationship.”
She has no regrets about her movies – not even Barbarella. “It’s almost feminist. She runs her own spacecraft!” she jokes of her breakout role as an outer-space sex kitten. But a nude scene was difficult. “I didn’t like to get naked. Vadim promised me the titles on the opening sequence would cover everything that needed to be covered. He lied. So I just got raging drunk on vodka. It turned out we had to do it a second time the next day, so I was hungover.”
Later, when Fonda starred as a call girl in 1971’s Klute, for which she won her first Oscar, she spent time with prostitutes. “I went with them when they bought their cocaine, and to after-hours clubs … I saw a lot. All the women I met seemed so broken.”
She is proud of her activism, but concedes she made big mistakes.
In 1972, Fonda faced the wrath of many Americans after she went to North Vietnam to speak out against the war and posed on an anti-aircraft gun, earning the nickname “Hanoi Jane.” The controversy has followed her ever since. “It’s my nature that if I know if what I’m doing is right – even though I’ve certainly made mistakes – it makes me more determined to keep going. Which means I’m not going to stop talking about what’s wrong with the Vietnam War, or corporate control of our economy, or other things I speak out about,” she says. But she does regret some of her actions. “What I’m most sorry for is that I sat on an anti-aircraft gun and had my picture taken,” she says. “It’s hard to even explain how it happened. I was kind of out of my mind when I look at myself in those images.”
In 2015, she told veterans protesting one of her speaking engagements, “I will go to my grave [ knowing] I made a huge, huge mistake that made a lot of people think I was against the soldiers.”
She still misses her second husband, activist Tom Hayden, who died in 2016.
“He was brilliant. He was a movement star,” Fonda says. Still, it wasn’t an easy marriage. “He made it hard to love him as a husband,” she says. “He was a womaniser and an alcoholic.” Fonda says that when her career began to truly take off – she won a second Oscar for Coming Home, and her workout video was suddenly a bestseller – Hayden became detached. “Because he was lonely, he fell in love with somebody else,” she says. “I’m glad he did, because it gave me an excuse to leave. I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.” Fonda notes that she’s still very close with Hayden’s widow, Barbara, and their son, Liam. “They’re part of the family,” she says. “I love them so much.”
Ted Turner was the nicest guy ever – but she left him anyway.
“He was handsome. He was sexy. He’s brilliant,” says Fonda of her billionaire media-mogul third husband, now 79. She embraced horse riding and fly fishing on Turner’s Montana ranch. Yet she realised she’d always have to put her own needs secondary to his – and that was no longer acceptable to her. “There was an angel on [my shoulder] saying, ‘If you stay, you will die without ever becoming who you can be,” she says. “You will not really be authentic.’”
She’ll always feel sad that she wasn’t a better mother.
Fonda admits her relationship with her three children – Vanessa Vadim and her kids with Hayden, Troy Garity and Mary Williams – has often been strained. “I felt like I was a bad mother,” Fonda says in the documentary, calling herself “terrified” as a young mum. But she’s working on it. “I am trying to make up for what I didn’t know before,” she has said. “I want them to love me, and I have to earn that.
“You can’t banish the demons,” Fonda admits of her lifelong feelings of inadequacy. “They’re still there, but you learn to put them in their corner and not let their voices be the governing voices.” She says she still has plenty more to learn—and she’s happier than she’s ever been. “I’m 80 years old. Half of my joints are replaced. I won’t live that much longer. But I’m really strong now.”
She beat bulimia in her mid-40s and has never looked back.
Fonda’s struggle with eating disorders began in her teens, when her father would criticise her weight. “I heard my father say things about my body that has twisted my life in deep ways ever since,” she says.
As for conquering the eating disorder, she says, “I realised that if I continued to be controlled by these addictions, my life would fall apart. As you get older, with each binge, the fatigue, the hostility, the self-loathing, lasts longer. I had a husband, children, a career … so I stopped cold turkey. It was so hard.” Her workout videos helped: they “gave me back a sense of control over my body … and that kind of cemented my ability to eat normally.”
“Half of my joints are replaced. I won’t live much longer”