Jane Fonda: ‘What I’d tell my younger self ? That no is a complete sentence’
As her new book on the climate emergency – What Can I Do? – is released, activist and Hollywood legend Jane Fonda speaks to Anna Silverman about what she’s learned from a lifetime in the limelight
say jane fonda’s name to a group of people and chances are each one will know her for a different reason: as the double Oscar-winning movie star; the sci-fi sex symbol; the doyenne of aerobics videos; or ‘Hanoi Jane’, the anti-war activist who earned the notorious nickname during a 1972 visit to Vietnam. Or, according to Donald Trump, Jane Fonda, a woman who has ‘always got the handcuffs on’. ‘Every 25 years they arrest her,’ he told a rally last year.
He’s right, in a sense: she was arrested five times last year while staging rallies in Washington DC to raise awareness of climate change. The arrests came nearly 50 years after her first, in 1970, when she spent a night in jail on trumped-up charges of drug smuggling, giving rise to her iconic fist-in-the-air mugshot.
Now 82, she doesn’t appear to be slowing down. If it weren’t for the pandemic, chances are she’d still be in the streets, leading her environmental movement, Fire Drill Fridays, with Greenpeace, and being thrown into a cell on a regular basis. But, she says, being arrested isn’t so bad when you’re ‘white and famous and you have a hit series behind you’, she tells me over Zoom from her LA home, referring to her Netflix sitcom Grace And Frankie. ‘I’m well aware that my privilege made the difference between what happened to me and what would happen if I was Black and not famous.’ Her husky accent is pure Hollywood. I can’t see her, she’s only doing audio today, but her unmistakable moviestar drawl rolls out of my speakers like I’ve left a film playing in the background.
It’s also hard to believe she’s 82: she’s sharp, droll, frank and her passion and energy for saving the planet is more often found in someone a quarter of her age. ‘I don’t tend to get bored. I don’t tend to get lonely.’ It figures, considering she dedicates so much of her time to Fire Drill Fridays, the rallies that have now moved online.
Her movement calls for the US to adopt the Green New Deal and for the reduction in use of fossil fuels. In her new book, What Can I Do? – a call to action urging us to wake up to the looming environmental disaster – she describes how the ‘kick in my stomach’ moment for her came when she read how Greta Thunberg felt traumatised after studying the science of climate change..
THAT “NO” IS A COMPLETE SENTENCE – AND I WISH I’D USED IT MORE WITH MEN’
Now, the time has come for civil disobedience and risking arrest, she says. ‘For 40 years we’ve protested, we’ve written books and articles, we’ve lobbied and we’ve marched and we haven’t been listened to.’
Desperate for change from the top, she spoke to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, on the phone. ‘I told her I wanted to try to have a meeting with her father, and that I was going to bring some very beautiful women who cared a lot about the climate and we were going to get on our knees and plead with him and tell him he would be the world’s biggest hero if he started to act to avert the climate crisis. And she laughed and said she’d look into it, and I never heard from her again. No surprise there,’ she says.
That Jane has access to the President’s daughter is nothing really, when you consider the circles she’s in and the people whose attention she’s caught. When Richard Nixon was President, he was overheard saying of her, ‘She looks pretty but, boy, she’s often on the wrong track,’ on a White House tape in 1971. She was in acting class with Marilyn Monroe and regrets not having sex with Marvin Gay: ‘He wanted to and I didn’t,’ she told The New York Times recently. Her first (of three) husbands was film director Roger Vadim, who was previously married to Brigitte Bardot. You could write a book on the number of impressive connections she has.
As someone who has been at the heart of Hollywood, culture, politics and activism for decades, she must know people who have been taken down by cancel culture. ‘Well, most of them deserved it,’ she says, referring to the Metoo movement.
Does she worry there’s anything she said or did years ago that, if it were to be dredged up now, could tarnish her name? ‘I’m almost 83, baby, and if I’m cancelled, so what? I don’t care. I just will do everything I can – and if they cancel me, that’s their problem.’
Media billionaire Ted Turner – aka ‘my favourite ex-husband’, as Jane refers to him – bought the rights to the film Gone With The Wind, which was recently pulled from HBO Max for its problematic depiction of slavery and racist stereotypes. It has since been brought back with an introduction condemning the racism. ‘It’s [Ted’s] favourite film,’ she says. ‘I think a film like that should not be done away with all together, but it should be put into context.’
That just leaves Tom Hayden, Jane’s middle husband, a political activist and her longest marriage, at 17 years. She says she learned many things from each marriage, one of which is that marriage is hard.
‘Those of us who have parents that stayed married their whole lives have a much easier job of making relationships work’, she says. ‘My dad [Hollywood star Henry Fonda] was married five times. I didn’t know how to make a marriage work. Maybe I was afraid of having a marriage work. I don’t know.’
She’s done with relationships now but that’s not to say she wouldn’t recommend marriage. ‘It’s beautiful when it works, when people grow together and are together for an entire lifetime. How wonderful. I wish that I could have experienced that.’
Is there anything else she has learned about marriage? ‘Oh, it’s too complicated,’ she says, before adding introspectively, ‘I’m missing something that would make a marriage work. I don’t spend a lot of time regretting the fact that I didn’t have one long marriage. I had three very nice, interesting marriages and I’m grateful for that.’
Other advice she wished she’d heard sooner is that ‘things will get better. Don’t give up. Don’t compromise yourself too early. Keep growing. Stay curious.’ When I ask what she’d tell her younger self, she answers immediately: ‘No is a complete sentence.’ Does she wish she’d said no more? ‘You bet.’ An example? ‘To men!’ she half shouts.
In April, she became one of the few octogenarians on Tiktok after being told it’s a good way to spread her climate message to young people. ‘I didn’t even know what Tiktok was. They told me what to do and I thought it would be fun, and I did it.’
Despite the role it can play in mobilising movements, she shudders at the thought of social media being around when she was young, especially when she recalls naked pictures she gave boyfriends. ‘It was easy, when you broke up, to just take it and tear it up,’ she says. ‘Oh, no, my God, if there had been social media when I was younger I’d probably be dead. I’m so glad there wasn’t.’
The many incarnations of Jane Fonda memorialised on an Instagram grid over the decades. If only we could see that.
‘What Can I Do? The Truth About Climate Change And How To Fix It’, by Jane Fonda, is out now (£20, HQ)