She's feisty, spirited, still beautiful and hugely inspiring. Jane Fonda tells Louise East about her eventful life
At 67 Jane Fonda is beautiful still. She admits to the odd nip and tuck but draws the line at Botox. "I'm telling you, everyone in America looks the same. I see someone coming towards me and I think, I know I know you, but who the hell are you?" There's more to Fonda than a famously retrousse nose and a pair of big blue eyes, though. She has been arrested and investigated for sedition, won two Oscars, triggered a craze for aerobics, coined a phrase - "Feel the burn" - married a film director, an activist and a media mogul and divorced all three.
When she decided to write her memoirs, her resource materials included biographies of her father and brother - the actors Henry and Peter Fonda - magazine interviews stretching back to the 1960s and videos of her own 41 films - plus some 22,000 pages of FBI files. She could be forgiven for taking a nap on her laurels, but, characteristically, Fonda has a slightly more focused approach to her later years. "As I approached my 60th birthday I realised it was my third act, the one where it all adds up - or doesn't," she says. "I realised I wasn't afraid of dying, but I am afraid of getting to the end of life with regrets, so I entered my third act very intentionally, intent on changing what I knew I would regret."
Most visible among those changes was the end of her marriage to Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, but Fonda also shone a spotlight on the murkier corners of her own life - her uneasy relationship with her father, her eating disorders and her failures as a mother - eventually acknowledging a gargantuan need to please. "When you think you're not good enough, you believe the only way to be good is to be perfect, but of course nobody's perfect," she says.
The resulting autobiography, My Life So Far, is 600 pages long and, unlike most celebrity memoirs, was written entirely by Fonda herself in fresh, intelligent prose. Although she's just spent five weeks promoting it in the US, she's clearly touched and not a little surprised by the interest on this side of the Atlantic. At the uber-literary Hay Festival, a sold-out public interview with Fonda had an atmosphere more like that of a religious revival than a book reading. When the BBC pundit Mark Lawson dared to ask whether Fonda had had cosmetic surgery, the audience practically snarled. "Who the hell cares, right?" Fonda crowed to rapturous applause.
By the time Lady Jayne Seymour Fonda was born, in 1937, her father was already well on the way to becoming an American icon. But if Henry Fonda turned in intuitive, articulate performances on screen, at home he was anything but. "He was cold and remote. Frankly, I think there was undiagnosed depression in his family," says his daughter.
Her mother, Frances Seymour Brokaw, was cold, too. After struggling with manic depression for years, she cut her throat when Jane was just 12. Told her mother had had a heart attack, Jane only found out about the suicide from a gossip magazine. Only recently did she apply for her mother's medical records, learning for the first time that her mother had been sexually abused as a child. "That was a transformative experience," she says. "It just answered so many important questions I had about her and why she was the way she was." She swallows and looks away; this is still tricky terrain.
Greta Garbo was the first person to suggest the young Jane become an actress, and, after classes with the method-acting guru Lee Strasberg, Fonda landed a string of roles in light and airy films such as Barefoot in the Park and Cat Ballou.
Yet despite receiving the kind of attention that other starlets could only dream of, she says it was not a happy time. "I was suffering from bulimia quite severely, so while there was this facade of a cute chipper ingenue, inside I just felt like a fraud."
Mulling over this period of her life caused her severe writer's block until she worked out why she was so miserable. "In the acting classes with Strasberg I had just started to express emotions, which I had never done before, because Fondas just don't do that," she says with a roll of her eyes. "I was very vulnerable and raw, and I went straight from that to Hollywood, where they told me to wear falsies and get my jaw broken."
So being young and beautiful in Hollywood wasn't so easy? Fonda looks startled. "But I didn't feel beautiful. It doesn't matter what's real; what matters is how you feel, and all I felt was fat."
During this time she married the French director Roger Vadim - fresh from his divorce from Brigitte Bardot - who directed her the next year in the infamous Barbarella. For Fonda it was a new life as bohemian sex kitten, threesomes, thigh boots and all.
A criticism frequently levelled at Fonda is that she swaps identities to match her husbands: sexpot with Vadim, activist with Tom Hayden, high-powered media matron with Turner. "My ego has always been like a colander," she says. "I haven't entirely contained myself, because up until now I didn't really know who I was. I was always looking for the core of myself. I did it a lot through men, and of course all I could learn from them was what I wasn't."
So could she be with the likes of Vadim now? "I could have an affair with him, which is what I should have done in the first place," she says, giving a fairly wicked chuckle. "I'm just kind of square. If there was a man I was smitten by, then I wanted to have family and a home and roots with him, when what I should have realised is: 'It's just sex, Jane. Don't try to do the whole thing with this one.' " She hoots with laughter.
Her involvement with the antiwar movement was entirely sincere, though; when she woke up to what was happening in Vietnam, she says, she left Vadim and France and became a full-time activist. "I don't do things halfway. I'm not a charity lady who is going to give out money at teas. I wanted to be in the fray."
Being in the fray meant having her phone tapped, her mail opened, her home ransacked and her public image dragged through the mud. She earned herself the nickname Hanoi Jane after ill-advisedly sitting atop an anti-aircraft gun on a trip to North Vietnam in 1972. Unbelievably, the slur is still potent; in a bid to discredit John Kerry in the last year's US presidential election, photographs were doctored to show Kerry standing next to Fonda.
"For six months after I returned from Vietnam nobody paid any attention to that photo. Then the right wing pulled it out and created this myth that I, and, by inference, the antiwar movement, was anti-soldier. They flog that myth to this day."
It's a particularly gruelling misconception for Fonda, whose antiwar activism consisted of working with GIs. Although she has no regrets about going to North Vietnam, she does regret that photograph, which came about in large part because she made the trip alone. "I mean, doh, Jane."
Activism is the one constant in Fonda's life; she currently works with young people on issues of pregnancy prevention and teenage sexuality, having campaigned tirelessly on everything from clean water to Native American rights. Even Jane Fonda's Workout, her 1982 fitness video, was a fundraiser for her husband Tom Hayden's Campaign for Economic Democracy. At 17 million copies, it remains the biggest-selling home video of all time - and triggered a fitness craze that continues long after her trademark leotard-and- legwarmers ensemble has gone out of fashion.
For a while she even toyed with quitting acting altogether, but instead she took hold of the reins and started producing her own films. "Suddenly I wasn't just a hired hand," she says. "The stories of my movies, whether a comedy like 9 to 5, a thriller like The China Syndrome or a love storylike Coming Home, were speaking about things central to my life. The only time I really enjoyed acting was when I made those movies."
One film in particular, 1981's On Golden Pond, was a personal as well as a professional project. "My father was dying, so I bought the play to produce for him, because I knew it would be my last chance to work with him. I also thought it would get him an Oscar, which it did," she says. "It was a very joyful, magical experience that summer. Everything fell into place. On the other hand, our roles so paralleled our real-life situation that it was also very intense and complicated."
Henry Fonda died just five months after winning his Oscar, never quite able to mirror the emotional reconciliation that he and Jane conducted on screen. "I don't think he was capable of it; I just don't."
Last month saw the release of Fonda's first film for 15 years, the critically mauled Monster-in-Law. Reviewers wondered why Fonda broke her retirement for this flimflam (once again, she says, for funds for her charity and out of curiosity) and also wondered why she had stopped acting in the first place.
The answer lies back in 1988, when Fonda's marriage to Hayden broke down. The day after her divorce was made public, Ted Turner began to woo her with characteristic vigour, always making it clear that, when it came to marriage, Fonda's continuing to make movies would be "a deal-breaker".
"I wanted to quit movies and become a full-time activist before I ever met Ted," says Fonda. "When I met Ted I thought, this is a man for whom I am prepared to give up certain things, like being an actress, in order to have the kind of relationship I'd been looking for. I loved him so much, and wanted it to work so much, that I realised what I wanted to do was work on myself to discover why I was so afraid of intimacy."
The pair married when Fonda was 54 and divorced when she was 62, spending the intervening years moving between Turner's 17 properties, attending flashbulb functions by night and fly-fishing on days off. Turner could not stand being alone, and Fonda rarely left him for a night; after they finally agreed to separate, Turner dropped her off in his private jet and picked up her replacement on the same trip.
Perhaps inevitably, Fonda had discovered that the more "work" she did on herself, the further she moved away from Turner. "I became a whole woman, and said, here, take me as a whole woman, and he couldn't do it. But I love him still; we talk every week on the phone."
Nowadays it is the women's movement that consumes Fonda's formidable energy. "The vibrancy and progressive vision in the United States now is coming from the women's movement. The sad thing is that the male left doesn't even know it." She is setting up a women's radio network with the feminist writer Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan, author of Sisterhood Is Forever. "In the third act I also have to fix the relationship with my daughter, so we're going to do a radio show together. We're going to get a bus and take the grandkids and travel around the country, interviewing families."
She says, without hesitation, that she is more at ease with herself now than at any other time in her life. "So many women come into themselves when they're older, because you're forgiven for not being perfect when you're older. The pressure to be perfect disappears, so you can say, well, screw that, I'm going to be who I am. It's very nice. It's very liberating."
My Life So Far, by Jane Fonda, is published by Ebury Press, £18.99