Jane Fonda dishes patriarchal dirt and plugs
Has Jane Fonda got a story for you, kid. The Hollywood icon is known for her candor with juicy anecdotes and sordid stories alike, and she offered up both on US cable TV this week.
Dishing to Watch What Happens Live host Andy Cohen, she recounted tales of an ill-behaved director crossing the line and a skinny-dip with a certain “Smooth Criminal.”
During Cohen’s “Plead the Fifth” segment, the Oscar winner Fonda was asked to name one of the men in Hollywood who tried to pick her up, whom she turned down.
“The French director René Clément,” she said, referring to the late director known for the Oscar-nominated films “Forbidden Games” and “Is Paris Burning?”
In her 20s, Fonda starred in Clément’s 1964 movie Les Félins, known in English as Joy House.
“Was it a sloppy pass?” Cohen asked.
“Well, he wanted to go to bed with me because he said the character had to have an orgasm in the movie and he needed to see what my orgasms were like,” Fonda said.
“But he said it in French, and I pretended I didn’t understand.”
Mary Steenburgen and Candice Bergen, who co-star in Fonda’s latest film Book Club: The Next Chapter (along with Diane Keaton ), were sitting beside Fonda as she recalled the encounter with Clément.
“This is what it’s like sitting around with them all day
long,” Steenburgen said, referring to Fonda’s deep well of Hollywood dirt.
Abruptly shifting the subject, Fonda blurted out, “I saw Michael Jackson naked.”
“He came and visited me when we were shooting On Golden Pond and I had a little cottage on the lake,” she said.
“And it was a beautiful moonlit night.”
“And you said let’s skinny-dip?” Cohen asked. “No, he did,” Fonda said. “I think [he did it] because he knew he was gonna die young, and that I would talk about him,” she joked, adding, “He was skinny!”
To wrap up the “Plead the Fifth” segment Cohen asked, “After your decades working in the entertainment industry, who do you think is the biggest misogynist in Hollywood?”
“Oh my God,” Fonda replied, seemingly dumbfounded. “I plead the Fifth.”
While Fonda knows how to tell a good story, she’s also a
committed political and social justice activist. Remember her notorious mug shot from 1970?
In 2018, Fonda discussed the #MeToo movement while promoting her HBO documentary Jane Fonda in Five Acts, and weighed in on whether men accused of sexual misconduct should have a chance at a comeback, and if so, how long they should spend shunned from the spotlight
“It doesn’t matter how much time. It depends on what the guy is doing,” the actor said.
“There are tools to help men become empathetic.”
For Fonda, “the big problem is that empathy is anathema to the social paradigm we live in called patriarchy. Men are trained not to be empathetic. So it’s not easy what they’re trying to do, but they have to try to do it. So it doesn’t matter if it takes two weeks or a year, two years, it depends on what kind of changes they’ve gone through.”
(Los Angeles Times/TNS)