Prime Time (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  If, however, our goal is to awaken to a new stage, to awaken our consciousness, harvest our wisdom, burnish our perhaps languishing soul so as to go deeper into life’s meaning and manifest it with compassion, then age can be a positive process of continued development and growth, moving us toward our goals instead of causing us to leave our goals behind.

  Plastic Surgery

  I have not hidden the fact that I have succumbed to wanting to look good in the mechanistic sense. Yes, at seventy-two I had plastic surgery on my jawline and under my eyes.

  From early girlhood, starting with my father, I was judged by how my face and body looked. This became what I thought determined whether I would be loved. I’ve tempered my anxiety around these surface issues, but I cannot deny that they still lurk. I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if those things hadn’t mattered as much. Would I have accomplished less because of being less driven to prove myself? I certainly would have had a lot more time to do character-enhancing things instead of obsessive ballet, dieting, suntanning and then tanning beds, and eventually plastic surgery. Oh, well. I finally got tired of looking tired when I wasn’t, and I wanted to be able to continue working as an actor in a field where it’s hard to work if you’ve not had any “work” done. (Or so I thought till I worked with Geraldine Chaplin, who hasn’t had a speck of “work” done, who works constantly as an actor, and who is absolutely glorious! Ditto the magnificent Vanessa Redgrave!) I still have plenty of cherished lines, however, and I don’t think I look like someone else, but my face is less droopy, and that makes me feel better.

  Droopy skin isn’t the only manifestation of my age. I choose shoes for comfort now, not style. As Ted Turner’s father once said, “What’s the good of money if your feet hurt!” My eyesight has diminished. When I began writing this book, I was using font size 14; now I use size 18 and still need glasses. And I rail at restaurants with menus whose print is so small and faint that I need a flashlight! Whatever it is I’m doing, I know now that I have to do it a little slower. I don’t leap gracefully out of cars; I don’t rush across streets; I use railings and am careful to watch where I step; I pay more attention to posture, partly for looks, but mostly so my back won’t hurt. None of these things is a big deal. I know others are less fortunate, including those who face major health problems. I’m not happy about any of my physical problems, but I do not want them to define me. Instead, like many people I have talked to who are in Act III and whose stories are in this book, I just get on with my life, trying to live it, make it useful, and enjoy it as fully as I can. The Positivity and Generativity that I write about in Parts Two and Four are very much at the center of my life.

  More on the Longevity Revolution

  Opting for mounting the staircase of life rather than staying on the descending arch becomes especially important given that, as already mentioned, longevity has become a new cultural phenomenon. Certainly, there have always been very old people—my mother’s father and mother lived into their nineties—but they bore little resemblance to grandparents of today. My grandparents did not seem to enjoy the potential vibrancy we can now expect. They did not come of age with an awareness of the importance of aerobic and weight-bearing exercises for keeping our metabolisms high, our weight in check, and our muscles and bones strong. No one knew, really, about the cost of smoking cigarettes, or about the healing effects of good cognitive therapy, twelve-step programs, or meditation. They didn’t have the benefits of joint replacements or organ transplants, or medicines that can eliminate or at least relieve many of the major age-related illnesses or conditions (including Viagra, Cialis, and testosterone therapy).

  My maternal grandmother, Sophie Seymour, holding Vanessa as a baby, 1968.

  With Malcolm, my grandson, when he was about one year old.

  RICHARD PHIBBS/ART DEPT

  Today, almost 20 percent of the U.S. population is sixty-five or older—25 million men and 31 million women—and every year people live two-tenths of a year longer!

  Think about it: At the time of our founding fathers, in the eighteenth century, the average life expectancy was only thirty-five. Since then, science, modern medicine, improved nutrition and lifestyle, sanitation, and lower maternal mortality rates have extended our life expectancy by forty-five years, from thirty-five to eighty! As I have said, this represents an entire second adult lifetime. The jump of thirty-four years in just the last century is truly stunning given that during the previous forty-five hundred years, from the middle of the Bronze Age to the twentieth century, human life expectancy increased by only twenty-seven years. This may be one of the most dramatic changes in contemporary times, and we have barely begun to come to terms with what it means for us individually, for the future of our society, and for the planet. From a policy and cultural point of view, we are still functioning as though this extension of life expectancy hasn’t happened. That is why Professor Arnheim’s staircase is the one we need to climb.

  If we are not burdened by a debilitating disease, this is the time when we can begin to assume our essential personhood.

  Freed from being so strongly defined by a uterus or penis or a taut body or a job or our relationships to our children, to a partner, to a firm or a profession, we now have at least a third of our life span still to go. In that time, we can explore life’s new potentials and deepen what we already are and what we already know.

  Becoming Whole

  When I wrote My Life So Far, I called the section about Act III “Beginning” because that is what it felt like then. Now that I am a decade into this act, I think a more fitting title for this stage would be “Becoming Whole.” To see Act III in this way, to see it as continued human development, represents a revolutionary paradigm shift. Ours is the generation to make this shift, to reinvent the last third of life, and we will do it not just for ourselves. It will represent a seismic shift for the world around us, and particularly for our children and young friends. Whether we like it or not, we have become the first role models for the younger generations of how to prepare for the last third of life. Here’s to being good role models!

  The next chapter is about why doing a review of my life has changed everything for me now.

  Vadim and his mother with baby Vanessa.

  Grandma Sophie Seymour with baby Troy. Behind her is a wood bust of my half-sister, Frances, carved by my dad.

  Holding baby Malcolm in 1999.

  Vanessa trying to get a tuxedoed Malcolm to look at his grandmother presenting an Oscar in 2000.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Life Review: Looking Back

  to See the Road Ahead

  He is the happiest man who can see the connection between the end and the beginning of his life.

  —GOETHE

  Dad’s father and mother, close up.

  ONE OF THE SMARTEST THINGS I EVER DID—AND I CAN SAY this unequivocally—was a life review. I examined myself and my life in Acts I and II as carefully and honestly as I could, as a way toward wholeness and to prepare for a good Act III. By doing a life review, I gradually began to see myself, as well as certain events and people in my past, with new eyes. It wasn’t the facts of them that changed; it was the meaning they held for me. I was able to see my younger self in a new way—with both more compassion and more objectivity. The quality of my relationships to certain people and events in my past—my mother and father, especially—was also transformed, as was how I feel about myself now. In a way, I discovered the feisty, strong girl I had always been.

  The Meaning We Assign to Our Lives

  Only recently, while reading Man’s Search for Meaning, by the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, did I understand why my personal life review had such an effect on me. Frankl, who spent many years in a Nazi concentration camp, came to the conclusion that everything you have in life can be taken from you except one thing: your freedom to choose how you will respond to a situation. That, I now believe, is what determines the quality of the life we have lived—not whether we’v
e been rich or poor, famous or unknown, healthy or ill. What determines our quality of life is how we relate to these realities: what kind of meaning we assign them, what kind of attitude we cling to about them, what state of mind they trigger.

  Act I: Me at age three.

  Act II: Me with Vanessa, speaking at a rally in 1972 when I was pregnant with my son, Troy.

  © VINCE COMPAGNONE

  ACT III: AT THE GOLDEN GLOBES, 2011.

  FRAZER HARRISON/GETTY IMAGES

  Beginning a Life Review

  It was the day of my fifty-ninth birthday—December 21, 1996—when it first hit me: In one year I will turn sixty, and that will be the beginning of my last act—the final three decades of my life. “Last”s and “final”s had not been featured in my prior vocabulary, and, frankly, as I faced the looming six-oh, I felt a knot in my stomach.

  I was leaning against a hay bale in the back of a pickup truck when the realization swept over me. Four cowboys and I were heading back to headquarters after a long day rounding up bison on one of Ted Turner’s spacious ranches in southern New Mexico. Dear reader, I know this is not the first time something in my life has sounded like a scene from a bad western movie script! But that’s how it was.

  Me rounding up bison on one of Ted Turner’s ranches in southern New Mexico.

  © ANNIE LEIBOVITZ/CONTACT PRESS IMAGES

  As we drove across the top of a high mesa, the vast, lunar landscape extended as far as I could see—endless, flat mesas, volcanic rimrock, steep canyons where exposed geologic strata gave evidence of upheavals and ancient oceans, created perhaps during Paleolithic times. Surrounded on all sides by stark reminders of the earth’s fourteen-billion-year existence, I felt the issue of time—the inexorability of it—pressing in on me. Okay, I know that in the grand scheme of things, three decades are negligible, but this was my life. Those three decades to come were my decades. What had I done with all the time—the almost six decades—now past? What did I want to do with my remaining time? How could I make the most of these coming years?

  In the theater, the Third Act is when everything that has happened in Acts I and II must pay off if the play is to be memorable. “Maybe life is like that,” I thought. Maybe, in order to know how to have a good Third Act, I needed to look back at Acts I and II—to do what is called a life review. Maybe in order to answer my own questions, I would have to figure out what my first two acts had been about.

  I knew I had to clear a path to my future by clarifying the road from my past until now. As I said in my memoirs, My Life So Far, I didn’t want to be like Christopher Columbus, who didn’t know where he was headed when he left, didn’t know where he was when he got there, and didn’t know where he’d been when he got back.

  As we drove past walls of exposed rock, I saw how the stratifications revealed events, layered one on top of another over long periods of time. Just like life. Experiences are laid down, and for a while, the most recent one is the top, the plateau, the ground on which you walk. But then newer experiences occur and new layers are put down, changing the size and color and slope of what came before.

  By the time the cowboys and I had arrived back at ranch headquarters, I had made up my mind that I would spend my fifty-ninth year excavating my life—examining the strata of my years.

  I had also decided to make a short video based on my research that I might show, if it was good enough, to guests at my sixtieth-birthday party a year hence. This would give me a concrete narrative project with a deadline that I would have to meet. Maybe from the vantage point of fifty-nine, after surveying, observing, and reflecting upon the events and people of my past, I might gain a new understanding of them. And a new understanding might lead me, loins girded, into a successful last act.

  I had a lot of experiences to learn from. We all do. There is a very human tendency to deny the failures and tragedies in our lives, but these are the very things that sometimes deliver us to ourselves—if we can learn from them.

  I have known failures of all kinds: career failures, wrong paths taken, time wasted, relationships spoiled—the bumps along the searches and meanders of my life. Those failures that I ran from taught me nothing. Those that I confronted, cozied up to, and understood were the ones that permitted me quantum leaps forward. In another way of looking at it, they became the compost from which new growth emerged.

  There are usually no rewards without a price. You can’t learn much that is new by playing it safe. Someone once said to me, “God doesn’t look for awards and medals, God looks for wounds. God enters us through our wounds.” I decided I would look at my wounds, see what they could teach me, let them help me set my compass and rechart a course for the time that remained. What I had to continually bear in mind—and heart and body—was the knowledge that life isn’t a dress rehearsal. This is it. I may have conceived of life in acts, but this coming period wasn’t an act! I had to try to get it right.

  I saw some things that I needed to work on in this Third Act: my sense of fun and humor; my capacity for intimacy. I knew I didn’t want to die without succeeding in an intimate relationship with a man. I realized that I might have chosen the partners I did in Act II because they, like me, were challenged in the intimacy department.

  I saw what I wanted to do in Act III: keep myself as fit and healthy as I could; repair the breaches with those I felt I should be closer to; learn to avoid stress and be more patient; lead with a loving heart; and stay useful and engaged with issues that matter the most to me, such as helping adolescents see a bright future for themselves and ending violence against women and girls.

  I saw what I wanted to stop doing: judging people who disagree with me; being impatient.

  What would you say about yourself? What do you want to have as goals for your life? What do you want it all to add up to?

  A Life Review

  When I first began excavating my life, I found myself reviewing events as someone perched on the outside, chronicling what had happened: I did this; then I did that. It helped me get started, but before long I felt it to be an empty exercise. The power of the memory of my experiences was muted by my focusing solely on the fact that they had happened. I was on the outside looking in, as if I were watching a movie.

  What I needed to do was to go inside my experiences, to delve deeper—to try to recapture them more fully by bringing myself back into how that little girl and then that adolescent had felt back then. This involved active remembering—that is to say, remembering not just in my head but also in my body. I needed to envision my experiences and bring the accompanying emotions back into my body—which, if we really think about it, is where these memories and feelings existed most pungently and where they exist still; memories reside not only in our linear minds but also in our bodies, our cells, our tissues, and our senses.

  My Life Review

  Here are some examples of what my life review was like, at pivotal points along the way. Maybe this will help you think about how to get started on your own life review.

  FIRST MEMORIES

  I was two years old when my brother was born. My first memory is of my father coming back from the hospital with home movies of my mother, beaming, holding Peter in her arms. Watching the film in the living room of our home in Brentwood, California, was traumatic for me, at two. While going through a box of old letters I had saved but never revisited, I found a handwritten one from my maternal grandmother that read, “I shall never forget your reaction to seeing Peter in your mother’s arms. The tears streamed down your cheeks but you didn’t cry out loud.”

  I went through an album I have of my baby pictures, and I could find none of me in Mother’s arms. Only nurses with masks over their lower faces held me for Dad’s camera. I wrote about this in My Life So Far—powerful memories have a way of lingering. Mother had wanted a boy and must have been disappointed when I came along sans penis. I must have sensed her disappointment, the way babies can sense things. So when I saw the images of Peter in Mother’s arms, I
think I felt I’d lost her to him.

  As I thought about this in my life review, I began to grasp where my fear of intimacy may have originated, and to realize that I didn’t have in either parent a person comfortable with emotional closeness. I could choose to blame my parents and make that my life narrative, or I could try to understand why they were that way, feel empathy for them, and set my sights on charting a different course for myself.

  I began putting other pieces of the puzzle of myself together, like a detective. I discovered that my mother had suffered from postpartum depression when Peter was born. Nothing was known about postpartum blues back then. This partly explained her two-month absence from home following Peter’s birth. It had nothing to do with me. Facts. Facts. But underneath the facts were the feelings, and I began to access those when I took myself back into the little two-year-old girl sitting on the floor next to the 16mm projector, watching home movies of her mother and baby brother. I could hear again the whirring sound of the projector. I refelt my painful feelings of abandonment.

  Masked nurses held me and gave me a bottle while Dad took pictures.

  I’m not so sure about the new arrival, my brother Peter, here in Mother’s lap with my half-sister, Frances, looking on.

  My mother, around age 34.

  I studied family photographs, honing in on nuances of expression that might provide clues, hoping to recover proof of love in our family, love that was so rarely expressed. Yet I could see it on my father’s face as he played with me, at one year old, in our pool. So he did love me when I was very little! But how glum I was in childhood photos with my mother, as though deliberately sending a signal for all who cared to pick up on it that hers was not the team I chose to be on. Compassion opened my heart when I noted the desperation in my mother’s eyes in the photo of our family posed to look as if we were on a picnic, one year before her suicide. Forgiveness began to creep into my heart, forgiveness of her and also of myself.